One of the coolest things about summer is having the opportunity to eat a variety of local vegetables. Who doesn’t love corn on the cob in the dog days of summer? Well, our visit with the Yarnick’s on September 5th started off with eating freshly picked raw corn. Yep, you read that right, raw corn. When you have fresh, juicy corn from the field, it’s doesn’t need to be boiled – trust me!

Dan Yarnick is the owner of Yarnick’s farm in Indiana, PA. This tour is one of the educational tours that we provide to our team members so they can fully appreciate the passion that’s behind those local veggies that are used at our locations.

After we tasted sweet corn, we visited the greenhouses to see what was being grown.  The heirloom tomato house was my favorite.  It’s amazing that these tomatoes were planted in February and will continue to produce fruit until October.

Many of  our employees are a little competitive, so to put competition into the mix, we decided to do a yellow squash picking competition.  The first person to fill a ½ bushel basket wins a basket of everything that the Yarnick’s grow.

We all loaded up on the back of a wagon that was pulled by one of their tractors.   The competition was fierce, since we had some seasoned veggies pickers.  Two of our team members grew up on a farm and picking squash was old hat to them and of course one of them was crowned the winner.

When you visit our locations, it becomes evident that one of the things upon which we pride ourselves is our commitment to purchasing local through our FarmSource program.  Hopefully, these little guys look familiar.  Our friends at Yarnick’s grow all of our local grape tomatoes for our salads at Eat’n Park.   It’s one of the most labor intensive jobs on the farm, but they take pride in knowing that these tomatoes are big part of separating us from other restaurants.

I hope that you enjoy reading about our farm tours.  I look forward to telling you more about the food we source and the important steps we’re taking in being a sustainable food service company.

Until Next Time,

Jamie