By Robin Mather
The Specialty Food Association recognized the positive contributions of six members who, while running their own businesses, took time to do something to improve their communities and the world. The sixth annual Leadership Awards were presented to the recipients at the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, California, in January.
Former Whole Foods Co-CEO Walter Robb keynoted the awards ceremony, speaking about how quickly things have changed in the specialty foods industry, and the imperative for retailers to keep up. “Salt, butter and sugar — that was the Holy Trinity in the early days of the Specialty Food Association,” he said. “We have never seen a rate of change happening this fast. The present has never been this temporary.”
He urged the audience to “lead from a sense of purpose and of mission,” which helped him grow Whole Foods from a “little natural foods store in 1978” to the retail leader it is today. New retailing opportunities mean that “we’re all looking at an incredibly expanding world of food in an endless aisle.”
The awards recognized two business owners in each of three categories: business leadership, citizenship and vision. In the business leadership category, honorees were recognized for advancing best practices to benefit food industry employees. Meg Barnhart of The Zen of Slow Cooking in Lake Forest, Illinois, was lauded for the company’s social mission of hiring employees with disabilities for their packaging team. The Zen of Slow Cooking was also recently became a Certified B Corp.
“Who knew a slow cooker would be a vehicle for change?” Barnhart quipped while noting that her company got its beginnings in her discovery of the slow cooker as a boon to the overburdened mother. The company’s Sichuan Slow Cooker Spice Blend won a sofi Award for best new product in the seasonings and spice category last year.
Christopher J. Patton of the Midwest Elderberry Cooperative and River Hills Harvest Marketers LLC of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was also honored in the in the business leadership category. Under Patton’s guidance, a cooperative of elderberry growers got its start in the upper Midwest, giving growers a chance to compete against imported European elderberry products.
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In the citizenship category, Ryan Emmons of Waiakea Hawaiian Volcanic Water in Culver, California, was recognized for the company’s social mission: The company donates a week’s supply of clean water to drought-stricken regions of Malawi for every liter sold. More than 500 million liters of water have been channeled to rural regions through the company’s charity partner, Pump Aid.
Sam Mogannum of Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, California, was also honored in the citizenship category for the company’s many contributions to its community, including a nonprofit called 18 Reasons, a subsidized cooking school that gives consumers confidence to buy, cook and eat good food. The program connects with roughly 6,000 students and community members per year. “We’re all about community, love, passion and integrity,” Mogannum said. Speaking of 18 Reasons, he said, “We all need to lead with more love.”
Mohammed Ashour of the Aspire Food Group in Austin, Texas, was honored in the vision category. Aspire aims to end hunger and protein insuffiencies by producing roasted cricket snacks under the Aketta label here in the United States. The company also grows palm weevil larvae for family sustenance in Ghana.
Thierry Ollivier of Natierra by Brandstorm in Van Nuys, California, was also honored in the vision category. Ollivier’s company was the first to offer Himalayan pink salt in the United States, and introduced the goji berry to Whole Foods. The company’s Feed a Soul program provides a meal for every child in a school in Haiti. “So far, we have provided 350,000 free meals to school children,” Ollivier said. “Our goal is 1 million meals in 2018.” In a poignant moment, he dedicated his award to his late two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who died two days before Feed a Soul launched.
“These six specialty food entrepreneurs reflect the great power and impact of our growing industry on society at large,” said Phil Kafarakis, President of the Specialty Food Association. “It’s an honor to recognize their positive social, economic, and environmental achievements – all undertaken while also meeting the daily challenges of managing successful businesses.”
Nominations were made by members of the Specialty Food Association and others in the specialty food industry. A panel of judges composed of industry experts and influencers selected the honorees from more than 50 nominees. The judges included: Polly Adema, University of the Pacific, San Francisco, California; Cathy Cochran-Lewis, Whole Foods Market, Austin, Texas; Lou Cooperhouse, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Margaret Core, Food Marketing Institute, Washington, D.C.; Maren Keeley, Conscious Company Magazine, Seattle, Washington; Bruce Nierenberg, Greyston Bakery, Yonkers, New York; John Raiche, UNFI, Providence, Rhode Island; and Lisa Sposato, City Harvest, New York, New York.
By Lorrie Baumann
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday that it is withdrawing the animal welfare regulation it had delayed three times. The rule would have established animal welfare standards that would have applied to the producers of organic livestock and eggs. The regulation was proposed in the waning days of the Obama administration after the completion of a rulemaking process that included extensive public comments, which were overwhelmingly in favor of adopting the new standards. In the opposite camp was the National Pork Producers Council, which applauded the USDA action. The USDA delayed the rule following the inauguration of the Trump administration, and then delayed it further. Before the final withdrawal, the rule had been scheduled to take effect in May and would have applied only to products bearing the USDA-certified organic seal.
The Obama-era regulation – the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices rule – would have incorporated into the National Organic Program welfare standards that were not based on science and that were outside the scope of the Organic Food Production Act of 1990, according to the National Pork Producers Council, which maintains that the Organic Food Production Act limited consideration of livestock as organic to feeding and medication practices.
“We’d like to thank Sec. Perdue and the Trump administration for listening to our concerns with the rule and recognizing the serious challenges it would have presented our producers,” said NPPC President Ken Maschhoff, a pork producer from Carlyle, Illinois.
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NPPC maintains that animal production practices have nothing to do with the basic concept of “organic.” The Organic Trade Association begs to differ. “USDA wrongly alleges that the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (OFPA) does not authorize the animal welfare provisions of the OLPP final rule, and, in doing so, cites definitions of organic outside the law,” the organization said in a statement.
“It is notable that USDA cites the Merriam-Webster dictionary to justify a definition of ‘organic,'” said Organic Trade Association CEO and Executive Director Laura Batcha. “Merriam-Webster also defines outdoor as ‘not enclosed; having no roof,’ and porches as ‘a covered area…having a separate roof.’ Organic standards already require that organic producers provide their animals access to the outdoors. So, by the assessment from Merriam-Webster, a source which USDA endorses in its official notice, porches are clearly not allowed in organic.”
The Organic Trade Association has filed suit in an attempt to force the USDA to implement the rule and will now be amending its complaint to challenge this new USDA action. “Since the filing of our lawsuit last September, a host of organic stakeholders representing thousands of organic farming families, organic certifiers and organic policymakers – along with leading animal welfare and retail groups speaking out for millions of consumers — have joined our challenge,” Batcha said. “The organic sector depends on USDA to set organic standards fairly and according to the law. When USDA fails to do this, it is time for the organic community to insist that it live up to its responsibility.”
By Lorrie Baumann
Ariane Daguin thinks that the way forward for brick-and-mortar grocers is to focus on selling their customers better food rather than more food. As the CEO of D’Artagnan, which distributes high-quality meat and poultry products to fine-dining restaurants as well as to grocers across the U.S., she has a bird’s eye view of how the American grocery business is evolving to try and meet the challenge of online grocers.
She notes that over the past decades since the end of World War II, grocers have been offering their customers more and more – more food, greater variety, year-round supplies of products once thought of as strictly seasonal. “You cannot have quality if you offer too many flavors of too many different products,” she said. “We have created a market for a lot of things we don’t need but that are pushed to us.”
The tide of consumerism inspired by modern marketing and the media’s obsession with what’s new and different has led inexorably to bigger stores and growing costs to operate those bigger stores. Those higher costs and the consumer expectations that caused them are now creating greater competitive burdens for brick-and-mortar grocers struggling to survive against online retailers. “The grocer has a big conundrum – which is the rent,” Daguin says. “It’s survival – they need to pay the rent. The problem is that it doesn’t work any more, because e-commerce has taken over. The consumer has so much more convenience and choice with e-commerce that the grocer has to really worry.”
Daguin suggests that the way to deal with this problem is to follow the lead of those successful grocers who now emphasize quality and who are creating a sensory and educational experience in their stores instead of just pushing volume. “To bring new clients in the store, you need to propose experiences that they cannot get online: true education from knowledgeable store employees, personalized custom fabricating, butchering and cooking in store, tastings…” she said.
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Focusing on quality rather than variety is the approach she has taken in her own 33-year-old company. “What we did from the beginnings of D’Artagnan was to thrive towards excellence in all facets of the company, pushing farmers to very strict animal husbandry rules, slaughterhouses to process and butcher with more care, to stop bloating meats with water, controlling temperatures from loading docks to trucks to store … for one reason only – the quality of the product at the end,” she says.
D’Artagnan’s Green Circle chickens provide a handy example – they are raised free-range and fed a diet of actual vegetables, are certified-humane and air-chilled. They’re also antibiotic free. “We were the first ones, and we’re still pretty unique in that we demand that all animals be antibiotic free from birth,” Daguin says.
The chickens are processed in small slaughterhouses rather than in industrial-scale facilities, chilled with air rather than water and brought daily to a D’Artagnan warehouse in Georgia, Texas, Illinois or New Jersey. The air chilling reduces their weight, raising the cost per pound, but it means that there’s no dilution of flavor. “We get our deliveries from the chicken slaughterhouse every night,” Daguin says. “So every day, they get the one-day-old chickens. Nobody else can say that.”
From the warehouse, the chicken is put on a truck that has extra temperature controls to ensure that the chicken arrives at the market as fresh as possible, with the longest possible shelf life for the retailer. “We take this totally to the need of the retailer. They need the maximum shelf life for the products, and minimum quantities in each case,” Daguin says. “These are not corn flakes that fly off the shelves.”