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NATURALLY HEALTHY www.gourmetnews.com n SEPTEMBER 2019 n GOURMET NEWS NH 6 4 sale or a family reunion. With just a few pantry staples and about 20 minutes of bake time, anyone can whip up a batch of these slightly chewy, intensely flavorful squares in a flash. The end result perfectly balances lemony curd with honey-like figs, a melt-in- your-mouth cookie base and just the right amount of powdered sugar. A tempting com- bination of tart, buttery and sweet, they're an easy choice for lemon-square lovers looking to expand their baking repertoire. For more information, call 888.326.5678 or go to www.stonewallkitchen.com. Stonewall Kitchen (Cont'd. from p. 1) When Stacy's sold, I was admittedly lost. I wanted to stay connected to the industry and keep work/life balance intact, so I opened a local juice bar. This is where BeBOLD Bars were created and sell like crazy. Similar to snacks, the bar category is super crowded. BeBOLD Bars are the first product I have felt has the same potential as the Pita Chips. I just know it. The common theme between all compa- nies? You have to start with taste, first and foremost. A bar is really a snack and your snack should taste great. We started with a great tasting bar. Then it was up to my brother Dave (an original pita chip guy) to scale the company and bring the dream to fruition. This included bringing on some of the people we worked with over the past few decades. GN: You've already had a successful exit with Stacy's Pita Chips. Why would you want to start another company? SM: Stacy's changed the snack food busi- ness. Each time I go to the store and watch a mom put a bag in her shopping cart, there's a sense of reward and satisfaction. That isn't something you can buy, its earned and trusted. I know I can make a similar change in the bar category. Personally, I watch the news and cannot believe what craziness is going on in the world, so for me this is a way of putting some sanity into what I've felt is an insane world. Creating this company is how I know I can make a change, even if it's just as simple as an en- ergy bar, so I am stepping forward and doing what I know I do well. It might be small, but if we all do a little something, it can make big change. GN: What has the response been to the bars, and why the refrigerated section? SM: When you speak to people about bars, typically they say they are choosing a partic- ular brand for a reason; more protein, whole grains, it's good for me – but rarely do they say, 'I love them, they taste great!' We are not trying to be anything in particular; high protein or low carb, but we are plant-based with clean and pure ingredients. Juice bar customers would purchase a bar for $3.25, then return and buy 10 for $25. They're in the refrigerator because our base ingredient is nut butter. We add oats, Brazil nuts (yes, those expensive ones), wal- nuts, chia and chocolate chips. Our team likes to say, 'Sweetened with bees and trees' (wildflower honey and dark maple syrup). We mix, press, package. Nothing more, noth- ing less. The protein is from nuts. Gluten and dairy free. Eighteen grams of whole grains and kosher. Personally, I love them frozen, too! For more information, visit booth #957, go to www.beboldbars.com, call 855.623.2653 or email info@beboldbars.com. BeBOLD Bars (Cont'd. from p. 1) around 1987, while he was trying to copy his mom's recipe for a western North Carolina- style barbecue sauce. Phil came up with an incredible barbecue sauce that had people asking for more! It was made from the ingre- dients in his kitchen: tomato paste, apple cider vinegar, honey, molasses, mustard, horseradish, lemon juice, onions, garlic, pep- pers, natural hickory smoke, natural spices and salt. GN: How did you come up with the name? SF: While driving to Charleston, South Car- olina, to find my youngest son, Patrick, an apartment for college, I was trying to come up with a name for the sauce. I thought about how good it was and how it made me do something I had never done before – suck on the bones to get the last little bit of flavor. This reminded me of what my mom does when something was really, really good. GN: When did you realize you had a win- ning product in Bone Suckin' Sauce? SF: I realized we had a winning product when customers started being repeat cus- tomers and turning their friends onto the Bone Suckin' Sauce. Repeat customers are the biggest compliment you can have with any service or product. Customers were buy- ing it for themselves and also buying Bone Suckin' Sauce and shipping it all over the world to share it with their family and friends. GN: Has Bone Suckin' Sauce won any com- petitions? SF: Bone Suckin' Sauce entered the North Carolina Battle of the Sauces in 1994 and took first place in a crowded field with over 10,000 people in attendance. With increas- ing rave reviews, the Bone Suckin' Sauce won best in sales and set sales records every year in the Winner's Circle, the elite cate- gory of past 1st Place Winners. Bone Suckin' Sauce was off to the races and heading for grocery and specialty store shelves from there! GN: How do you decide to add items to your product line up? SF: We only add items that taste great and have clean ingredients. GN: How many items do you have now? SF: We have quite a few amazing items in the Bone Suckin' line up. We have four types of Bone Suckin' Sauce (Original, Hot, Thicker Style and Hot Thicker Style), two Mustards (Original & Sweet Spicy), Wing Sauces (Garlic & Honey and Honey & Ha- banero), Seasoning & Rubs (eight varieties including Original, Steak, Chicken, Veg- etable, Lemon Pepper, Cajun, Seafood & Hot), our version of Teriyaki which we call Bone Suckin' Yaki, Steak Sauce and Hiccup- pin' Hot Sauce. For more information, visit booth #553, call 919.833.7647 or email sales@bonesuckin.com. Ford's Gourmet Foods (Cont'd. from p. 1) on their winter range in the Sacramento Val- ley and a delay in the appearance of spring on the 17,000 Shasta Valley acres roamed by the farm's pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks and turkeys – and its cattle, moved up from the winter range after spring has finally crept north to green up the pastures at their sum- mer home. "We're taking advantage of Cal- ifornia's Mediterranean climate, so we follow the seasons," Rickert said. "That's something my great-grandfather did 100 years ago.... We move cattle in trucks now. It's a lot easier." Rickert is a fifth-generation rancher who started his career after graduating from Cal Poly with his agriculture degree at his fam- ily's Prather Ranch, just across the mountain from Belcampo Farms in Siskiyou County. "I loved it, but I realized that family businesses are not the easiest," he said. He moved on from the family ranch after 12 years there but continued earning his living in and around California agriculture until he got the chance in 2017 to manage the regenerative agricul- ture practiced at Belcampo Farms, which supplies the meat for the company's six restaurants and butcher shops in the Bay Area and Los Angeles as well as its newest loca- tion in the Hudson Yards development in midtown Manhattan, New York City. One of the first things Rickert did after he was hired in late 2017 was to take a look at the farm's pasture management and irriga- tion program. Cattle numbers were de- creased slightly to reduce pressure on pas- tures that were expensive to irrigate, and some of that land was dried, saving some of the cost to pump water to them and reducing some of the risks of drought. "It focused the irrigation on the fields where it was going to be efficient," Rickert said. "If your books are red, you can't be green.... I want us to be very careful in a drought situation." His responsibilities also include oversee- ing the Meat Camp programs that are part of the company's strategy for educating the public about its humane meat production, its regenerative agriculture practices, and in general, where their meat comes from. For the past four years or so, Belcampo Farms has accommodated up to 24 people at a time in June and September for three days of feasting on open fire-grilled meats, learning butchery and practicing their knife skills with Belcampo chefs, collecting eggs from the free-range laying hens, harvesting their own vegetables in the organic garden and fruit from the orchards and touring the farm to get a close look at the farm's sustainable farming practices. "We look at this as a core part of our production here," Rickert said. "Consumer education is key.... I want to con- nect people with agriculture. I want them to know where their food comes from.... Soci- ety used to embrace agriculture because more people were connected to it." The farm's philosophy, posted on signs here and there around the property, is that Belcampo Farms delivers "great taste and quality in every cut, from every animal, every time," through transparency and by working together to care for their animals with compassion, patience and the best food. The point of the meat camps is to give visi- tors a chance to see how that works on the ground. "We've found that getting people out to agriculture and having experiences like this – people leave changed," Rickert said. "The type of consumer who shows up here really wants to learn and is just excited by this. That's the kind of person we want. They tour the farm, learn about farrowing pigs, how the cattle are raised." The farm's 180 sows are a mixture of Duroc, Chester White, Ossabaw and Berk- shire breeds. They breed naturally and then birth their piglets in farrowing barns that pro- vide them with room to move around, root through straw bedding to make their nest and nurse their babies in peace. Two or three weeks after farrowing, the porcine families are moved to group lactation pens where eight sows and their piglets live together for a few weeks, with piglets nursing from whichever mom is convenient and willing. At eight weeks, the young swine are weaned and separated into market groups and turned out to pasture. "Pigs are really good at tear- ing up a field," Rickert said. "Pigs we really look at not just as a commodity but as a land management tool." Swine are harvested and processed at about nine months. As the spring piglets are being born, newly hatched chicks, ducklings and turkeys arrive from a third party hatchery and go into warm brooder houses, where they live for about the next month. "As soon as they can thermo- regulate, they go out to pasture," Rickert said. The laying hens will already be out in the pastures, laying their eggs in mobile nest boxes mounted on trailers and pecking their way around a fenced paddock that's moved along with their trailer every few days so they have fresh grass and bugs to peck at along with their laying ration. The eggs are used in Belcampo's restaurants and whole- saled to grocers, and the byproduct manure stays where it falls to nourish the grass. "It just makes these fields explode with fertil- ity," Rickert said. The farm also has 1,200 ewes and about 1,200 mother cows, born, bred and pastured on the three neighboring ranches that belong to Belcampo Farm before they're herded qui- etly into trailers and trucked about 20 miles to the company's U.S. Department of Agricul- ture-certified and Certified Humane process- ing plant in Yreka. The facility was designed by Temple Grandin to ensure that the animals suffer as little stress as possible during their one bad day. The meat is sold in Belcampo's restaurants and butcher shops, and it's tracked all the way from birth to the butchery to its end consumer through a fully traceable coding system. "We're fully vertically integrated from farm to table," Rickert said. "It's not a factory that produces widgets." Belcampo (Cont'd. from p. 1)

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