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GOURMET NEWS AUGUST 2019 www.gourmetnews.com NATURALLY HEALTHY 1 4 A Snack Brand Continued from PAGE 1 meditation and superfood ingredients to enhance their lives for the price of a non- GMO, gluten-free and kosher snack bag. You can finish off a bag and not feel guilty." Snack foods are currently among the top categories in retail sales of specialty foods, according to the "2019 State of the Spe- cialty Food Industry" report unveiled to the industry during the Summer Fancy Food Show. The report also noted that refriger- ated and front plant-based meat alterna- tives were among the top 10 categories with the highest dollar growth over the past year. Ehrlich has been thinking about the manifold benefits of snack foods and the psychology of crunch for more than 30 years. He founded the Pirate's Booty brand in 1986, left that behind in 2013 after the com- pany was sold to B&G Foods, and immedi- ately started thinking again about what drew consumers to the snack food aisles of their grocery and convenience stores and how he could make snacks that would capitalize on consumer desires for a little more crunch and flavor with a bit less salt and sugar and an ingredient deck that could wear a halo. As he looked around him at the world he saw almost 30 years after he'd begun build- ing a brand based on puffs made of corn, rice and cheese, Ehrlich had his feelers out – he prides himself on a unique talent for sensing trends and finding ways to act on those intuitions. Corn had lost favor since it had become ubiquitous in the American food chain, but Ehrlich thought he could find another grain that could be puffed and could be produced with less water and en- ergy than corn could claim. What's more, he could be nimble in a way that a big cor- poration committed to corn could not be. "We kind of had a feeling – the non-GMO, gluten free, plant-based craze was starting in 2012," he said. "To me, it's an everyday event to seek out new paths for food and nutrition." As he considered the spectrum of con- sumers who were driven by those concerns, he saw the vegans at one end, a small fringe group of con- sumers as sheer numbers went, but a group comprised of passionate advo- cates for causes with emotional resonance among their peers – peo- ple who'd respond to the appeal of snack foods with righteous ingredients, real flavors and the satisfaction and comfort of a crunch. Veg- anism still carried a bit of a stigma in those days, but Ehrlich thought the times would move past that, and attitudes would soften – he decided to brand his new snack line with a name and colorful packaging that wore the title with pride: Vegan Rob's, and sell it to consumers who fancied the idea of becoming a vegan – even if only until they'd reached the bottom of their bag of snack puffs. "We're not trying to be any- thing but transparent in our attempt to modernize the snack as a therapy tool, not just a frivolous meal replacement, but something that's much more than that for consumers," Ehrlich said. "The big companies don't seem to get it, but we do. When you buy a product, you're buying it for a reason. Sometimes it's to calm you, some- times to make you feel important. There's a soci- ology to consumerism." Ehrlich easily em- braces the contradic- tions between lofty abstraction and the con- crete realities of selling snack foods in a crowded conventional marketplace. He's now making his Vegan Rob's products in six plants in the U.S. and three in the U.K. and selling them around the world. Products sold in the United States are made domestically with ingredients sourced in the U.S., while the U.K. plants make chips and puffs for sale in Britain, the European market and else- where. He's taken the brand from the co- ops and independent natural foods stores where he started out into mainstream channels with products like the 2019 sofi Award-winning Dragon Puffs, whose fla- vor starts smoky and spicy and finishes cool. "It takes you on a journey," Ehrlich said. "Once that cool is gone, you need another bite.... Smoky's hot now." His love of that kind of contradiction is evident, too, in the Burger Puffs he launched at this year's Sweets & Snacks Expo – it's a vegan puffed snack with the flavor of a "flame-broiled" fast food burger. "You can't get any more contradictory than saying 'vegan' and 'burger' on the same package. The flavor makes people think about burgers and the beach, gives the mind a chance to reflect on the memories," Ehrlich said. Burger Puffs came to the Summer Fancy Food Show this year along with Vegan Rob's newest products – canned sorghum po- tato crisps with probi- otics and vegetable seasoning and a popcorn that also offers a vegan collagen derived from sea buckthorn. For the future, Ehrlich is planning to take the Vegan Rob's brand on beyond snack foods and into other lifestyle prod- ucts that share his philosophy of humanity, health and compassion. "We're looking at anything and everything. It's not just snacks that we're involved in, though they've made a nice platform. The bottom line is that we're fun. People are looking for fun these days and not just nutrition. "If you're grateful and humble, that's going to come back to you in so many ways, and that's what's missing in life," he said. "We try to do that here." GN Dryland Farmers Continued from PAGE 1 Oien grew up on his family's wheat farm in north central Montana's Golden Triangle before heading off to college for a degree in philosophy and religious studies that still informs his farming mis- sion today. After several years of working and traveling in Europe following his col- lege graduation, he came back to the fam- ily farm in 1976 determined both to repay his parents for the upbringing and education they'd given him and to prac- tice a system of agriculture that's kinder to family farmers and to the land than conventional wheat farming. Today, Montana farmers like Oien in- herit the state's history of dryland agri- culture, which began with the 1877 Desert Land Act that drew settlers to homestead in arid lands across the Amer- ican West. These new homesteaders re- lied on assurances from agriculturists like Charles Dana Wilbur that "Rain fol- lows the plow," and when the climate re- fused to obey those prognostications, the development of modern irrigation as- sisted by the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902. With the newly opened land, ir- rigation projects across the American West, improvements in farming technol- ogy, and the introduction of hard red winter wheat in the 1870s, American wheat production took off. The country's annual wheat production more than tripled in the 50 years between 1871 and 1921; increasing from about 250 million bushels during the period of 1869–1871 to more than 750 million bushels during the period of 1919–1921. Then came the Great Depression and the collapse of agricultural markets that led to the paradox of huge national grain surpluses and widespread hunger. The New Deal followed, with the Roosevelt Administration's Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to fallow some of their acreage when the nation had a grain surplus. New Deal agricultural poli- cies that controlled national grain sup- plies and stabilized markets remained in force until 1971, the beginning of Earl Butz's tenure as Secretary of Agriculture. Butz's policies, encapsulated in his decree that farmers needed to "Get big or get out," reversed the New Deal's protections for family farmers in favor of industrial agriculture, bigger equipment, more acreage. That was the farming economy that Oien returned to in 1976. His father had resisted that temptation to get big even as neighbors around him were deciding that, presented with a choice that wasn't really a choice, they were getting out and putting their farms up for sale. "One of the pieces of wisdom he left me was that he'd rather have the neighbors than the neighbors' land," Oien said. "That meant we needed to make our small farm viable in a different way." Inspired by Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Frances Moore Lappé's "Diet for a Small Planet" and the connection be- tween Earth and humanity explicated in "Black Elk Speaks," Oien set to work to convert the family farm to organic pro- duction just at the time Lappé and others were helping Americans understand that there might be a connection between what they were eating and their own health as well as the planet's. "My ap- proach has always been, 'Get better and you can stay in.' For me, getting better meant converting the farm to organic pro- duction," he said. "Our farm is 260 culti- vated acres, while the average farm in Montana is about 2,400 acres, nearly 10 times larger. There are some farms in my county that are 20,000 acres, so our farm is not only small – in a sense, it's obsolete. But on the other hand, converting it to or- ganic and developing the infrastructure to process our crops has allowed the farm to survive another generation." Practicing organic agriculture meant finding a means of replenishing soil de- pleted by nitrogen-hungry wheat crops without the use of synthetic chemicals. "The challenge with monocropping, monoculture within a given field, is that it makes those crops more susceptible to disease, to insects, and also requires input of chemical fertilizers. The crops that we grow, such as lentils, chickpeas and peas, are soil-building crops by their very nature," Oien said. "They're legumes that have the power to capture the atmos- pheric nitrogen and convert it into nitro- gen in the soil that's accessible to crops." In 1987, Oien joined three fellow or- ganic farmers: Bud Barta, Jim Barngrover and Tom Hastings, in a company called Timeless Seeds to introduce those legu- minous crops to other farmers in the northern Great Plains and spread the gospel of organic production. Their ex- periments with pulses, the edible seeds of legumes like peas and lentils, coincided with the growth of the natural food in- dustry in the early 1990s that created a demand for organic grains and seeds, and Timeless Seeds capitalized on that de- mand to grow the infrastructure they needed to turn their raw crops into mar- ketable organic food products. In 2001, the company created its Timeless Natural Food retail line of premium lentils, peas, chickpeas and heirloom grain. To supply that line, the company now works with about 50 certified organic family farms, primarily across Montana with a few in neighboring states as well. "We provide them the opportunity to grow crops that diversify the cropping ro- tation and to grow crops that are higher value," Oien said. "I think one of the things that's most promising is that we are not only supporting these farms, but we're also having a greater and greater en- vironmental impact across the northern Great Plains. As the market for high-qual- ity plant-based protein grows, farmers can convert some or all of their land to certi- fied organic production, and Timeless is part of the infrastructure to find or create high-value markets for family farms by distributing to food retailers, restaurants and chefs, institutional food service and food manufacturers." Visit www.timelessfood.com for more information about Timeless Seeds and the company's Timeless Natural Food re- tail product line. GN