By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

It’s almost Girl Scout Cookie time, and this year some local Girl Scouts are making special sales that will provide the tasty treats to hundreds more local families than usual.

(L-R, Cascadia’s Jillian Moore & Jeremy Vrablik, mom Kari Scheff & Scout Kyla Scheff, WSFB’s Lester Yuh & Karla Marifjeren)

Cascadia Produce is owned and operated by a West Seattle couple, Jillian Moore and Jeremy Vrablik. Their produce-packing business made a big pandemic pivot to help ease food insecurity. They now specialize in emergency food boxes – creating and distributing about 10,000 a month. This year, they plan to buy hundreds of boxes of Girl Scout Cookies from local Scouts and add them to the boxes.

One place through which they provide boxes is the West Seattle Food Bank. On Mondays, they provide boxes that are picked up by DoorDash drivers and taken to recipients who can’t come to WSFB to get them. These boxes are funded by Food Bank donors, but Cascadia also packs boxes paid for by state funds. The funding for those boxes runs out soon, but Gov. Jay Inslee‘s supplementary-budget proposal includes $74 million to extend that funding through the state Department of Agriculture. The proposal is currently before the state Legislature.

We talked with the Cascadia duo on Monday just before their weekly distribution at WSFB, joined by one of the West Seattle Scouts from whom they plan to buy cookies, Kyla Scheff from Troop 45180. The eight-year Scout says she and her troopmates appreciate Cascadia Produce’s support; her troop will be selling cookies online this year, and pre-ordering is already under way

Cascadia, meantime, is working on the logistics of their bulk Girl Scout Cookies purchases. They look at it as another way of locally reinvesting the funding they get from the state, as they do with whatever’s in season, when their suppliers include many women- and BIPOC-owned farms. Side note – they also fight food insecurity in their own North Delridge neighborhood, with Carrot Man’s Carrot Stand, stocked with box leftovers free to anyone who needs it:

(Photo courtesy Jillian Moore)

If you want to support their work, you can ask legislators to back continued funding for food insecurity relief. Contact info is here – we’re in the 34th District, and you can find contact info for local House Reps. Eileen Cody and Joe Fitzgibbon and Sen. Joe Nguyen there. And if you want to buy cookies – Scouts are selling to friends and family now, and official sales start February 11th. (New flavor this year – Adventurefuls!)