"And if I know anything at all, it's that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down."

Assata Shakur

What is Zeromile?

Zeromile is an old idea come around again: a dual cooperative model rooted in food justice, economic sovereignty, and community collaboration. Through our Member Co-op, individuals gain access to healthy, local foods at reduced costs while supporting the operation of a dynamic space for markets, events, and education. Our Producer-Worker Co-op empowers small producers of all kinds with affordable production space, shared resources, and opportunities for collaborative revenue-sharing and retail.

Driven by a vision to decentralize power in food production, Zeromile fosters partnerships between farms, cooks, and fermenters to create value-added products, expand food access, and further build resilient food systems. As a replicable model, Zeromile aims to inspire other communities to build localized systems that support both people and planet. 

Interested in joining as worker or producer? Please reach out!

Zeromile Cooperative is fiscally sponsored by the Keystone Development Center

About the Founders

Amanda Pagniello
Amanda Pagniello
Sowing Liberation
Amanda Pagniello is a food service veteran, accumulating 12+ years of experience in front and back of the house. Post food service, they chose a path in agriculture to develop a deeper understanding of ecology, farming, and wider food systems. They most recently worked at the nation's largest food rescue non-profit as one of the first stops for food donors, volunteers, and those in need calling into the Dispatch line, which granted them an ear into communities in and around the PGH area. She currently works as consultant.
Trevor Ring
Trevor Ring
Community Cultures
Trevor Ring is the founder of Community Cultures. He has taught fermentation for over a decade, worked for numerous agriculture, food and fermentation businesses, and produces fermented products in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is most excited about sharing his knowledge of fermentation, creating resiliency within the food system through fermentation, and utilizing seasonal and regional ingredients to inspire his ferments.

Trevor Ring
Marie Mencher
Lil'Loaf
Marie Mencher is the founder of Lil' Loaf, a small business specializing in the production of fruit leathers and seasonal baked goods. She is a graduate of the Fulton Commons Accelerator program and a participant in the 2025 Franklin Street Market series in the Manchester neighborhood. She has worked on behalf of Jak's Bakery at the Farmers Market Cooperative of East Liberty and is currently an Academic Advisor at CCAC.
Trevor Ring
Jayashree Iyengar
Popping Mustard Seeds
Jayashree Iyengar is the owner of Popping Mustard Seeds LLC. She specializes in teaching Indian vegetarian cuisine. She grew up in Chennai, India before she moved to the United States more than four decades ago. She is an experienced chef and teaches both private and public cooking classes at various locations including the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh.
She is also a Mechanical Engineer who worked at Westinghouse as an engineer for more than two decades. Her passion for cooking and teaching led her to transition to the culinary world. She has a MAFS from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Trevor Ring
Lisa Ray
Hammajack Heat Co.
Lisa Ray is the founder and owner of Hammajack Heat Co., a Pittsburgh-based hot pepper sauce company that handcrafts small-batch, naturally fermented sauces. With no formal culinary background and previous work as a Certified Public Accountant and business executive, owning a hot sauce company is the last thing she would have pictured herself doing years ago.

Lisa believes that success is measured not only by the products she creates, but by the relationships she builds and the opportunities she creates for others. That philosophy inspired her to create Pittsburgh's Rivers of Fire, the city's annual hot sauce festival, which brings together local makers, small businesses, and spicy food enthusiasts.
As a member of ZeroMile, Lisa is excited to connect with purpose-driven leaders who believe thriving businesses and thriving communities are built through local collaboration, service, and meaningful relationships.

Cultivating a new way.

Member Co-op

The function of the member co-op model is multi-purpose: to help reduce purchasing costs of healthy, local foods, to encourage community and economic development, and to support agrarian pathways and food education. How, you ask?

Cost reduction: The member co-op will function as a buyers club. By buying into a membership (with different buy-in options), you are buying into bulk purchasing power, which will result in higher buying power for you.

Community & Economic Development: By becoming a member, you are directly supporting the operational costs of running Zeromile. Your contribution keeps the doors open, lights on, the community events going, food pathways expanding, and more.

Co-op Member Benefits: Access to healthy, reduced-cost foods. Discounts on producer co-op products and classes, as well as access to book kitchen time at a reduced rate- along with your typical cooperative benefits of a vote and profit share!

Worker-Producer Co-op

Worker-Producer co-op members are small to mid-sized producers of various kinds who work out of the facility on a part-time to full-time basis. As a worker-producer member, you will have ownership of the co-op, a voice, and an affordable space to create your product. There are exciting opportunities to co-create for revenue sharing, and the ability to contribute to projects that have real community impact.

As a worker-producer member, you will benefit from shared resources we all have a say in. What does this look like? Bulk sourcing from suppliers and farms, revenue shares, voting rights, specialized equipment access and purchasing, and reduced cost back-end services such as marketing, and more.

Larger Vision

The larger vision for Zeromile is to assist in creating a different sort of structure for community and individual support. The goal posts don’t just include breaking down the wall and removing gatekeeping from the food production industry. We are creating a space that actively supports the decentralization of power that one sees in kitchens and businesses. We are fostering an environment of active collaboration between producers and the community. We are writing a blueprint on how a kitchen and producers can function within a neighborhood in context, meeting people and producers where they are.

How are we doing this?

Collaboration: By bringing talented producers together to plan and execute collaborative revenue-sharing projects. Projects like producing food programs and funding. This would look like utilizing bumper crops from local farms, gardens, and donors to produce value-added products that will be sold with a portion of the proceeds going into a granting pool we are calling the Ferment Forward Fund- providing barrier free grants for food sovereignty, community and food access projects that often face bureaucratic restrictions, like mutual aid collectives. Holding dinner fundraiser pay for pay-what-you-can dinner services to help equitably redistribute prosperity without shame. There are many possibilities. 

Coordination: Working with different farms, gardens, producers and donors, we will strive to help expand food access. By creating a strong farmer/producer network, we will work with nonprofits to assist in developing food programs to create and expand access to food for underserved populations and those in need. Asking: What does coordination and collaboration look like within the neighborhood? Can we expand a pay-what-you-can model sustainably by partnering with restaurants in the area? 

Continuation: What is the line of connection between coordination and collaboration? How can we continue to meet people where they are? What could happen if other neighborhoods, in other parts of Allegheny, picked up this model to support their communities in the context of their needs and producers? This is what we mean by blueprint. As a first of its kind, our goal is to be an inspiration to others, and make ourselves and our model accessible for others through advisement and open source sharing.

Capital: In the future, the goal is to evaluate and leverage our net worth. We live in a capitalist system, so we need to utilize capital tools in strategic ways to create new systems that can, eventually, thrive outside of the current one. What can we support and expand on with our capital? What does that look like? Maybe it is buying land in Allegheny County to start a farm that supports both the co–op and bolsters its food access program, along with creating further job and training opportunities in foodways, shortening the food supply chain. Whatever it is, it will be focused on supporting economic and food sovereignty for and by the people! 

Donate to our Give Butter Campaign!

Our Values
Why a (dual) cooperative model? Well, beyond the obvious answer: Cooperatives speak to the goals of not just decentralizing power but centering workers, creating a feedback loop in business. We don’t want to start a business, but create an ecology. Instead of looking to anyone above for answers or permission, we look to ourselves and the people around us, in an ongoing act of integrity and creation of interdependence and really real sustainability, guiding us to create more regenerative systems of support. We can’t and won’t adhere to financial dependency, and strive to remove ourselves from the cycle of grant and foundation funding that leads to power dynamic struggles. Our goal is to caringly cultivate financial solvency and move beyond it in ethical ways.

We don’t want to just break down the wall; we want to demolish it completely. Old ways don’t work, and the systems around us have been crumbling at an exponential rate, exposing the ways in which “solutions” are often just band-aids, backwards, or outright malicious. Community care is not radical, it is necessary. “Business as usual” doesn’t and never has addressed this.

In Permaculture, or more respectfully, agroecology, an indigenous look at land care, it is encouraged to view a problem as a potential solution. To do this means to step back and look at the bigger picture, to see what is going on and where. To acknowledge and recognize systems, both invisible and obvious, and how to approach them. To view things holistically, not just as individual or separate parts. Applying all of this as an ongoing practice, we can change our approach to better address problems, a little at a time, step by step. All the while, observing and listening, so we can pivot and respond respectfully to our members, to our community, to our city, and to our environment. 

Financial Transparency

Coming soon....

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