In West Philly, the Pandemic Pantry buying club is gaining steam

A curious vanishing act has been happening in West Philadelphia for nearly four years. Every Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, a garage door rolls up at 705 S. 50th St. and a grocery store appears. There are locally grown onions, tomatoes, apples, sweet potatoes, plus Philly-baked baguettes, sourdough, and pastries on sidewalk tables. Just inside, there’s an array of farm-fresh eggs, dairy, local meats, fresh seafood, and even nuts, seeds, and baking supplies. Customers arrive by the dozens, filling milk crates and reusable bags with food, greeting neighbors, settling checks.

After a few hours, with most of the goods gone, the door rolls down, and — poof — the storefront is transformed. Suddenly it’s simply Third Wheel Cheese Shop again.

This disappearing supermarket is known as Pandemic Pantry. It’s a rare shutdown workaround that has outlived its COVID-era origin story. Nicknamed PanPan, it’s technically a buying club: a free-to-subscribe weekly grocery pickup patronized mainly by West Philadelphians and a smattering of those who come from beyond. It’s flourishing not only as a shopping spot but as a community hub.

Pandemic Pantry is the handiwork of Third Wheel Cheese’s owner, Ann Karlen.

Karlen is well-connected in Philly’s local food scene. She cofounded the Fair Food Project in 2001 with White Dog Cafe restaurateur Judy Wicks. The nonprofit was a pioneer, first connecting local farmers and producers with chefs and wholesalers, and later introducing those same suppliers to retail consumers via the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market.

Karlen stepped down in 2017, a year before the Farmstand closed somewhat acrimoniously. Her next project, Third Wheel Cheese, didn’t get off the ground in earnest until 2019. It built on relationships with cheesemakers and chefs established by former Fair Food employees like cheesemaker Paul Lawler and cheese expert and author Alexandra Jones. Third Wheel’s mission was to bridge that gap, buying from small cheesemakers, cutting wheels into manageable portions, packaging them, and distributing them to restaurants. (Karlen added the retail storefront in West Philly in the spring 2023.)

Business was humming along when COVID-19 swept the rug out from under restaurants and food distributors alike. Karlen saw immediately that Third Wheel’s business would be slow to nonexistent.

“I just wanted to keep myself busy, so I emailed like 10 friends and was like, ‘I work with farmers, I’ll get some cases of produce, let’s split it up. It’s gonna be hard to go to the grocery store for a couple weeks,’” Karlen remembers. “Within a couple months we had 50 members.”

Today, the email list for PanPan reaches nearly 800 people. Karlen estimates it averages 140 orders weekly. The buying club’s volume has grown so much that Karlen is considering leasing more space next-door.

At the start of each week, Karlen and a small team of employees figure out how much product their respective distributors will send. They send out a Google Form with a sprawling selection of goods: vegetables from Lancaster Farm Fresh and Zone 7, Mighty Bread and Merzbacher’s loaves, Happy Valley Meat Co. pasture-raised beef, fish from Small World Seafood, chicken pot pies from Griggstown Farm, Milk Jawn ice cream, Rancho Gordo beans, Lost Bread flour, Camuna Cellars wine, and of course a lengthy list of local cheeses.

Orders arrive by the Wednesday morning deadline, as do deliveries. Packing starts Thursday with bulk-bin dry goods, measured out into recycled containers that PanPan customers return each week. Produce gets delivered Friday, as do baked goods, meat and fish, ice cream, etc. PanPan employees pack more on Friday morning, but refrigerated items get pulled at the last minute, when customers show up between 3 and 7 p.m. Friday or 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday.

In its early days, volunteers packed PanPan orders. Back then, “we weren’t thinking about [PanPan] in terms of a business model, but also people were just looking for something to do,” Karlen says. “Little by little, everybody got paid.” PanPan has one full-timer, operations manager Nick Olkovsky, and several part-time workers.

Last year, PanPan did just over $525,000 in sales — a 31% jump since 2021, the first full year it was in business. Third Wheel’s walk-in and warehouse space enable Karlen to keep margins low, but she also operates the buying club as a basically break-even business. A $4 service fee on each order covers the cost of labor and overhead, and discourages very small orders.

On a recent Friday afternoon at Third Wheel Cheese, customers show up with reusable bags and clean yogurt containers in hand. They pony up to folding tables, ready to transfer goods out of paper bags and crates. Each receives a list with their order, which they’re supposed to check against before paying their tab. They can also tack on last-minute extras: a slice of tomato pie, a wedge of cheese, some fancy olive oil from the pantry store.

Jesse Bacon arrives at 3 on the dot. “I try to make an afternoon of it,” the Grad Hospital resident says, just having visited Cleo Bagels. Bacon used to shop at Fair Food Farmstand, and he still buys local, using delivery services Philly Food Works and the Rounds to order many of his weekly groceries. He’ll go to conventional grocery stores, too, when he needs them. But if he can buy something at PanPan, he prefers to. He’s even asked them to add products so he can purchase through them instead.

“Of all the things I do, this is the best one,” he says. “I would go further than this for it.”

Sarah Wolk and 3-year-old Green Bean of West Philadelphia roll up soon after. PanPan workers recognize them right away and go retrieve their order. As they wait, Green Bean demands some sourdough, so Wolk adds a Mighty Bread baguette to their order. “Mmmm,” Green Bean says, smelling the bag.

Though Wolk has been a member since 2021, PanPan became a weekly ritual for the pair in fall 2022. They stop to pick up an order and buy apples on the way home from school, before Shabbos. They often see friends and neighbors, but Wolk also appreciates interacting with new people, like the post office worker who also stopped by with their child after school.

“With the pandemic, and having switched to working from home just 6 weeks before it started, I’ve missed loose connections to people like bus drivers and security guards and cashiers at the grocery store,” Wolk says. “I think [PanPan] helped fill that void a little for me, too.”

Chantal Tapé only recently signed up for PanPan, but she’s ordered three times since. “I shop at the farmers market pretty regularly, but this fits into days that I can’t make it there or [it offers] stuff that might not be there right now,” she said.

“I wish that I had signed up earlier because I feel like it would have been really useful when nobody was going to a store. But it’s still useful.”