Issue link: http://osercommunicationsgroup.uberflip.com/i/606687
GOURMET NEWS DECEMBER 2015 www.gourmetnews.com NEWS & NOTES 9 have been popping up across the country over the past few years. The increase in numbers is partly driven by fears about the prevailing food system and Americans' de- sire to know more about the source of their food, including who raised it, according to Ken Meter, President of Crossroads Re- source Center, a nonprofit consulting and technical assistance group addressing farm and food economies. "People feel quite vul- nerable. I've worked in Hawaii, where peo- ple realize that they're several thousand miles from their food sources, but I've also worked in South Carolina, where 95 per- cent of the food is imported, even though parts of that state have four growing sea- sons. People need access to the information and tools that make it possible to decide which foods they want to grow and eat, in- stead of accepting whatever someone de- cides to ship them," he says. "Many urban communities started making this shift 40 years ago, looking for a healthier diet. Then rural communities began to realize that the food they eat comes from far away, while farmers ship the foods they grow some- where else." Commercial kitchens provide a place where small processors can turn their raw products into value-added foods that have a longer shelf life, he added. This provides more chances to sell each item. Although it's clear that there's been a tremendous increase in interest in shared- use kitchen incubators over the past four or five years, it's difficult to know exactly how many there are, particularly since the definition of a kitchen incubator is fluid. In some cases, the phrase means that a restau- rateur has opened his kitchen to other users when the restaurant is closed. In other cases, it's a kitchen operated by a nonprofit agency that's focused on work- force development. Many that have opened over the past several years, though, are more like KitchenTown – commercial pro- cessing kitchens that allow for production of a variety of food products and that qual- ify as state- or federally-inspected food pro- duction facilities. Econsult Solutions, a consultancy advising on economics, policy and strategy, identified at least 135 shared- use commercial kitchen facilities across the U.S. in 2013 and noted great interest among venture capital investors in funnel- ing money into food projects. "Increasingly multi-sector maker spaces are including food-industry facilities or full-scale kitchen incubators in their models," Econsult So- lutions noted in a report on the phenome- non. For initiatives that don't start with deep pockets, you start small, and as you need to add capacity, you grow as sales allow or as you can access capital, Meter says. It de- pends on the support network you've been able to build. No kitchen is sustainable without a network of producers and cus- tomers, and building this can take time. There are a variety of models for the ownership and management of these oper- ations; some, like KitchenTown, are private enterprises, while others are affiliated with universities, and still others are not-for- profit enterprises operating in low-income or immigrant communities. The facilities they provide range from raw space with utilities through spaces that include equip- ment for various types of food production to facilities that also offer a range of tech- going to stay local." According to the USDA, there's more than common sense to back up that idea. Empirical research has shown that expanding local food systems in a community can increase employment and income in that community. With the Food and Drug Administration starting to put new rules coming out of the Food Safety Modernization Act into effect, Tusick echoes the concerns that brought Craig Carter to the Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center: "We've always been firm believers that every community needs in- frastructure for entrepreneurial develop- ment. Especially with food production, the regulatory requirements are so rigid that people can't comply on their own.... We're having to help these small-scale producers get up to speed. It's been quite a scope of work." Uncle Bill's Sausages Bill Stoianoff moved the production of his Uncle Bill's Sausages into the Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center nine years ago with technical assistance from the Lake County Community Development Corporation, which owns the center, to help him get his U.S. Department of Agri- culture licenses in order. "You have to have every word in the right place, and these people are really, really good at helping," he says. Before moving into Mission Mountain, he'd been making his sausages in the back of another man's butcher shop, and that meant that he could sell them only at local farmers markets – grocery retailers wouldn't touch a product that wasn't made in a USDA-inspected meat processing facil- ity. "To do USDA, you have to be perfect. But once you're certified, people will buy it because they know it comes from a com- pletely clean situation," he says. "I'm trying to supply the local grocery stores, and it's working quite well." This is a fairly large facility, he adds. Today, I'm in the packaging room with Jun- ior [an employee that Stoianoff hired through Job Corps], weighing out the sausages and packaging them and into the freezer they go. They'll be in the stores to- morrow. Wozz! Kitchen Creations I'm an Australian in America, winning with a Mexican condiment, Warrick Dowsett, Owner and Chef of Wozz! Kitchen Cre- ations said as he accepted the Specialty Food Association's 2015 sofi Award for Outstanding Condiment for his Kiwi Lime Salsa Verde. God bless America! That awards ceremony was the latest part of a journey that has taken the Australian food entrepreneur back and forth and back and forth around the world. nical assistance to new entrepreneurs who may need help designing a business plan or complying with permitting and licensing requirements. Mustard Seed Sauces Early in 2013, Craig Carter, Founder and CEO of Mustard Seed Sauces, found him- self in a situation similar to that Napa Cookie Company had experienced a few years earlier: he had a product that he knew he could sell to foodservice customers, since the customers at Mustard Seed and Noodle Express Restaurants in Montana and Washington had been enjoying the Mustard Seed sauces and dressings for 35 years. He and his business partner, who owns the restaurants, wanted to take the sauces they were preparing daily in their restaurants to the retail market, but they didn't have the means to do it on their own. "The obstacles were in learning how to pro- duce a product that the Food and Drug Ad- ministration and state regulatory issues will allow you to do. Once we started digging into the restrictions in that area, it was very plain to us that we were going to have to go to school and learn how to produce a shelf-stable product. We were going to have to get a package. We were going to have to label," Carter says. "But the primary obsta- cle was to get into an FDA-approved kitchen without having to put up half a million dollars." He found that kitchen in Ronan, Mon- tana, a tiny community in northwestern Montana with a population of 1,871 people at the 2010 census. "They had the ability to help us go to school, so to speak, and how to do this without a tremendous financial investment ourselves," Carter says. Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center The Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center in Ronan is owned and operated by the Lake County Community Development Corporation, a regional economic develop- ment authority. It's one of four food and de- velopment centers in the state of Montana that's funded by the state of Montana, says Jan Tusick, who's been a spearhead for the facility since before it was built at the turn of the 21st century. A farmer who produces sheep, garlic and onions, she worked with other farmers in the area to found Mission Valley Organic Growers in 1999. They en- listed the Alternative Energy Resource Or- ganization to help them do a community food assessment to identify the steps they needed to take to change a food system in which they were growing food that they couldn't sell. They knew that to sell their farm products to commercial buyers, they had to figure out how to aggregate their produce into a quantity and variety that buyers could use; they had to develop a marketing program; they had to figure out how to preserve a seasonal, perishable product until their buyers were ready to cook it and serve it. We found that it was really challenging because of lack of infra- structure, she says. That's a problem that's common among those who set out to develop a local food system. The USDA has identified barriers to local food market entry and expansion that include capacity constraints for small farms and a lack of distribution systems for moving local food into mainstream markets as well as a lack of knowledge of how to go about marketing local food. Like the growers who banded together as Mission Valley Organic Growers, most farms in the U.S. are small. In 2012, 75 per- cent of American farms had sales of less than $50,000 – more than half of all Amer- ican farmers have another job that provides a paycheck they depend on. To build a local food system in western Montana, the farm- ers decided that they were going to have to build a processing facility. "We did this fa- cility in three phases: it 2000 and 2001, we got some grants to build the first small kitchen. Then we continued to expand through grant programs," Tusick says. "It took 10 years to establish the core infra- structure, and then we added more equip- ment. Montana's Growth Through Agriculture program has helped buy nu- merous pieces of equipment to meet the needs of our clients." Today, the Mission Mountain Food En- terprise Center is a 13,000 square-foot pro- cessing facility that offers technical assistance to about 160 clients a year and production space to about 30 food produc- ers in any given month. Western Montana Growers Cooperative, another farmers co- operative that formed out of this organiza- tional drive, uses the facility as a hub for its Farm to School program. "We process the products that they take to the schools: chopped broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts. Some products are fresh, and there's a line of frozen products," Tusick says. The facility is divided into activity areas. There's a kitchen with two 100-gallon water-jacketed kettles that are used by clients who make barbecue sauce, hot sauce and cherry jams and vinegar. Another smaller kitchen has two 40-gallon water- jacketed kettles for the folks who are mak- ing their sauces in smaller quantities. There's a harvest wash area for fresh pro- duce, a US Department of Agriculture-in- spected meat room that's a home away from home for Bill Stoianoff and Uncle Bill's Sausages and a dry fill room that's used by a client who's making and selling a line of fine coffees. The facility has been a catalyst for the de- velopment of the regional food economy that its founders dreamed about when they started trying to figure out how to get food from their fields to families' forks. The pan- cake mix company operating in the facility uses grain raised in Montana; another com- pany is using Montana-grown lentils as an ingredient. "When people buy local food, if we could get 15 percent of the food dollar back to the local community, that's $66 mil- lion in new wealth.... Those dollars are ro- tating back into the local economy versus going out," Tusick says. "It's a 20,000-feet high look at the food industry, but it res- onates with people. It's kind of common sense. If you spend your dollar locally, it's Continued on PAGE 10 "It's kind of common sense. If you spend your dollar locally, it's going to stay local." — Jan Tusick, Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center