Golden Carrot Winner: Root Cellar Foods

As part of National Farm to School Month, we’re celebrating our community partners who help make our community an amazing place. We’re incredibly honored and thrilled to award Root Cellar Foods with a Golden Carrot Award!

Christina Angell, owner of Root Cellar Foods, graduated from MSU with a Bachelor's degree in Nutrition/Small Business Entrepreneurship. Following graduation, she began working at the Bozeman Co-op where she managed their offsite production kitchen for eight years. While Christina was working there, she decided to go to school at MSU for a Masters degree in Sustainable Food Systems. Both the work at the Co-op and the Master's degree led her to become very interested in local food and getting more into larger institutional food-services. With this idea in mind, Christina and two farmers started Root Cellar in 2014 with the goal of increasing the purchasing power of local foods. 

Christina believes eating local and supporting the community via food is one of the most important areas in sustaining a healthy environment. She thinks all people should have access to the same food so they can focus more on purchasing locally than buying from national brands and/or farms.  Part of this is making it economically feasible across the board.

Through her work at Root Cellar Foods, Christina has introduced more local, Montana foods to consumers via the online marketplace. Pre-pandemic, the business greatly increased the amount of local foods at MSU and other schools in the area. However, post-pandemic, a lot has changed. Despite post-pandemic challenges, Christina is proud of every time one of her market customers thanks Root Cellar for getting great, local food to them and their family. 

In the future, Christina hopes to shift the focus of Root Cellar into more Non-profit based ideas, such as helping food pantries across Montana get more local, fresh produce into their customers hands and making sure low income families have access to the food that's grown/raised/produced here in the Gallatin Valley. On top of that, she wants to ramp up school procurement again to pre-pandemic levels so everyone’s children and youth can enjoy the delicious produce grown in our Valley. 

We at GV Farm to School are grateful for the work you and Root Cellar Foods have done in our community! Thank you for creating more accessible opportunities to engage in our local food system.