Gourmet News

Peering into the Haze Around Transparency

Published July 18, 2018

By Lorrie Baumann

Grocery shoppers are asking more questions about the food they’re buying, and even though today’s food manufacturers are designing their labels to include more information about what’s inside the package, consumers still aren’t getting the information they feel they need to make educated choices about what they’re going to feed themselves and their families. “We’ve reached that point where people are finally starting to question, not only what our government does, but what everybody does,” said David Noll, Executive Director of Pacific Resources International, which imports its brand of manuka honey and other food products from New Zealand into the American market. He’s been in the health food business for 40 years after visiting New Zealand and falling in love with the culture there in a country whose total population is about 4 million people. “You can’t really spin something that’s not true because somebody will know,” he said. “Crime is very low in New Zealand, because if you commit a crime, somebody will know. I learned to love it…. They produce very high quality products, and they’re willing to stand behind them.”

His manuka honey is a product, that, because it’s used for medicinal purposes as well as a food, has a value that’s highly dependent on being exactly what it says it is, since low-quality manuka honey won’t have the same medicinal value as the premium-quality product. Because that quality isn’t distinguishable from anything that can be readily observed by the consumer who’s buying the honey in the store, those shoppers are particularly dependent on whether they can trust that the product really is what the label is representing it to be. That it sometimes isn’t inspires distrust, Noll said. “Things cannot be hidden anymore – they’re coming out all over. People are becoming disillusioned…. We find out that most of the time, it’s just junk – junk being sold in the store. They’re asking the questions about food.”

“We’re starting to see a resurgence — people who are saying, ‘What’s going on? We need real stuff.’” he continued.
“America is on this journey right now. Part of it’s about being healthy, but a lot of it’s a values journey,”said Glenn Rudberg, Chief Marketing Officer of Ethos Marketing, which provides marketing advice to the consumer packaged goods industry. “It used to be that good marketers forgot their values and focused on their ingredients…. Now consumers want to know where their brands stand. You can’t be in the middle anymore.”

“Consumers want that connection. They want that transparency. They want to know what they’re buying,” he continued. “They support small. They’re distrustful of large. They’re somewhat distrustful of government. They’re wanting brands that can connect to them on a personal level.”

The consumer packaged goods industry is transforming the foods they’re offering to grocers to comply with those consumer demands, Rudberg said. “Chobani, for instance, is trying to speak to a consumer at a higher level than just putting ‘Blueberry’ on a package. Smoothie King is reformulating the line. They’re reinventing their business,” he said. “You’re seeing brands reformulating with pure maple syrup rather than maple flavor…. You know that these larger brands are starting to take notice…. Campbell Soup is heeding the warning and recasting their tried and true recipes, moving towards cleaner food. You know that it’s hitting the mainstream.”

The Consumer Point of View

Consumers may couch their broad concerns about food in the language of health and wellness, sustainability or transparency, and part of the problem is that those terms themselves mean many different things to different people. For grocery retailers, the definition of ‘sustainable’ is making sure that they have the ability to source from their suppliers for extended periods of time, ideally in perpetuity, said Andy Harig, Senior Director, Sustainability, Tax & Trade at the Food Marketing Institute. “Farmers have been focused on that since time began. They are much more attuned to the impacts of weather and climate change, he said.

But for the consumer, especially the Millennial consumer, sustainability might have something to do with how the farmer and the grocer treats their work force or how the rancher and the processor treat the animals that are the sources of protein, eggs and dairy products. “We’re seeing the definition of sustainability broadening out into corporate and social responsibility. It’s a broader view, and it’s a view that every aspect of the supply chain needs to be taken into account and needs to be sustainable,” Harig said. “Supply chains that depend on exploitation of individuals are not just a matter of conscience but also a matter of economic sustainability. There’s an emerging view of what the term encompasses, driven in part by the Millennials, who have grown up with the idea of sustainability at the forefront of consciousness. It’s something they expect to be embraced.”

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Sometimes the problem is just that consumers don’t understand some of the acronymns and jargon they’re reading on the labels – they might think that the “G” in “GMO” has something to do with gluten because they may not know what either of those terms actually means, but they know they’ve heard about both of them as something to avoid, she said. She explains to them that sometimes what’s most important is that they look beyond the confusing label claims to consider the essential identity of the product they’re considering. “A non-GMO, gluten-free corn dog is still a corn dog,” she said.

The View from the Supply Side

According to the Specialty Food Association, in its 2017 report on the state of the specialty food industry, claims of sustainability are getting more attention from the supply chain. Close to 40 percent of manufacturers were producing sustainable products as of the 2017 report, up from 22 percent in the previous year. “Among retailers, sustainable products accounted for 16 percent of product sales, and share increased notably this year,” according to the report, which predicted that “sustainable” will be the claim most interesting to consumers in the next three years.

Manufacturers are still working hard to come up with label language that consumers can understand and that will appeal to them as they’re making their purchasing decisions, according to Severin Weiss, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of SpecPage, which is in the business of providing innovative solutions for the recipe-based manufacturing industry. “We have seen in the past that ingredients lists were sometimes too complicated for consumers to understand,” he said. “We’re now seeing labels with four ingredients, so you don’t have to be super-educated to understand all the chemical components.”
He advises manufacturers to provide on their labels the basic information that consumers want and will understand – a few ingredients, allergy information and country of origin along with the nutrition information mandated by the government. “That builds trust because it is complete information that he is looking for – it’s not just an ingredient list that he doesn’t understand at all.”

He suggests also that manufacturers use images wisely, on every medium in which they’re attempting to communicate with their customers, since today’s technology-savvy consumers are becoming more visual, and they use pictures as a source of information to an extent that hasn’t always been true. “There are only a few catalogs that have really good pictures, and the picture really speaks to the consumers,” he said. “Technology today is available, and depending on the device, he needs to have an optimized picture. The picture has to work on a mobile device, and it has to be informative.”

“If I look at how I choose consumer products, it can be hard to read the data sheet, and then how can you trust the data?” he continued. “Nice picture, clean label, all the information that the consumer is looking for, including nutrition, allergy, country of origin — that builds a lot of trust…. If a consumer sees a label with the information that it’s produced at the farm around the corner, that’s a different level of information from ‘Produced in the U.S.’ ‘Produced at an organic farm in Oregon’ — that’s a different message, and that message builds trust.

As a Nebraska Farmer-Rancher, Hilary Maricle is the beginning of the supply chain for consumers in the market for beef, pork and lamb as well as food processors who depend on corn and soybeans as ingredients for their products and other ranchers who feed them to their animals. She thinks that one way grocers can help consumers navigate their confusion is to help create links between consumers and farmers. She points out that social media provides a means of doing that without asking consumers to leave the store and drive down a dirt road until they find a farmer out standing in his (or her) field. She says she herself builds her social media around her children’s activities on the farm, and there are many other farmers who have an active presence on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, in part because they understand that consumers are hungry for information about where their food comes from, and they think it’s important that they provide information that reflects the farmers’ reality. “If our industry would see that story, that with us it’s a family operation, that would increase trust level,” she said. “It’s not normal for us to throw open the gates [to curious visitors] because there are safety concerns.” But now, modern communication technology has provided a means to show curious consumers more about the origins of their food without exposing them to the dangers of being around 1,000-pound animals or heavy farm machinery, she said. “We are learning we have to open the gates…. Even with all its imperfections, such as the weeds not being mowed or the barn not being freshly painted, consumers want to see what we’re doing.

Specialty Food Market Drives Social Justice

Published July 18, 2018

By Lorrie Baumann

Americans’ appetite for social justice as well as better food is paying premiums for farmers in developing countries. In its 2017 report on “Today’s State of the Industry,” the Specialty Food Association reported that in the United States, specialty food had grown into a $127 billion business, with a 15 percent jump in total sales between 2014 and 2016. By comparison, the growth rate for all food sales during the same period was just 2.3 percent.

Consumers are responding to brands that invest in social justice. According to a 2011 report on research by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the London School of Economics, “A majority of surveyed consumers claim to prefer ethically certified products over non-certified alternatives, and to be willing to pay a price premium for such products.” What that means for farmers around the world is that specialty food producers who command premium prices from American consumers are able to spread some wealth to the farmers providing their raw ingredients.

Under the brand The Ginger People, Abbie and Bruce Leeson produce a range of products that includes Arjuna Ginger Bites, Ginger Rescue Ginger Shots, Ginger Soother and Turmeric Latte Mix made from ginger grown in tropical areas around the world, including Fiji and Indonesia. The Leesons partner with groups of native farmers that grow the high-quality ginger they need as an ingredient for their products. Abbie is the company’s Brand Shepherd, and Bruce is its President.

In Indonesia, a farmers’ group in eastern Java formed a co-op to grow organic ginger for The Ginger People. “This is their first opportunity to enter the commercial market,” Bruce said. The Ginger People pays these farmers a premium price for the product that’s 15 percent more than the Fair Trade pricing plus 1 percent of revenue from product sales.

In its fifth year in Fiji, The Ginger People is the largest purchaser of ginger and now helps employ more than 100 people, including many women who are now able to pay school fees to educate their children. “This factory is helping them do that,” Bruce said. “We are a company that quietly goes about what we do. It’s not all about the money…. We now have a viable business partner, who with the additional support of Third World development organizations, is able to get the funding they need for better equipment. It’s a cycle of success.”

Ginger is an annual crop, planted every year in spring and harvested in autumn. In Fiji, that means the farmers plant in September and then harvest about half the crop in February. The rest of the ginger is left in the ground to continue growing for a later harvest of mature rhizomes with more fiber and spicier juice. The Ginger People is in the process of developing a juicing plant in Fiji to process that second crop, which will produce an ingredient for The Ginger People Turmeric and Ginger Shots.

“We are already getting limited quantities of turmeric and ginger from these farmers for our own brand, but next year, we’ll be able to buy from farmers for an extended period of February through November, so they have the opportunity for cash flow most of the year,” Bruce said.

Lisa Curtis was working as a Peace Corps volunteer in west Africa when she discovered the moringa tree, a deciduous tree native to the southern foothills of the Himalayas and widely cultimvated in tropical and subtropical areas around the world. Its leaves and young seed pods are widely used as vegetables, with the leaves being a significant source of B vitamins, vitamin C and K and other essential nutrients. “I started eating moringa for my own health,” she says. “The leaves have more nutrition than kale and are a complete protein. It wasn’t really eaten because it wasn’t being cultivated.”

When she asked local people why they weren’t cultivating and harvesting their moringa, they pointed out to there that they didn’t see a point, since they had no market for it. At the same time, interest in superfoods was exploding back home, and Curtis came back to the U.S. determined to help her African farmer friends, many of them women, take advantage of that. “I wanted to help those women get access to the American market and to improve their own nutrition as well,” she said. “Kuli Kuli’s mission is to improve nutrition and livelihood through nutrition-rich plants like moringa.”
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“We are now working with over 1,000 farmers, primarily small farmers, women’s co-ops and family farmers across 11 different countries in west Africa and South America,” she added. “We’ve planted over 1 million moringa trees. We’ve put close to $2 million back into these rural communities growing moringa.”

In the 4-1/2 years that Kuli Kuli has been on the market with its product line that now includes Moringa Superfood Bars, Pure Moringa Powder, Energizing Moringa Herbal Tea, and Moringa Green Energy shots, Kuli Kuli’s farmers have scaled up their production and are finding ways to include moringa into school feeding programs to improve their community’s nutrition. “We have found that, for the majority of our farmers, moringa is their most profitable crop, more than millet or corn or whatever else they’re growing,” Curtis said. “They’ve used that money to send their kids to school, to buy medicine for their families. In surveys, they say they’ve increased their own consumption of moringa.”

For craft chocolate maker TCHO, investing in cacao farmers pays dividends in higher-quality cocoa beans for the company’s chocolate bars as well as to farmers who get a premium price for their better beans, according to TCHO Chief Chocolate Maker Brad Kintzer and Laura Sweitzer, who manages the TCHO Source Program. “When we’re able to work together to understand all aspects of cocoa quality, there are two benefits: one, the cocoa farmers are able to increase the value of their cocoa, and second, that we’re able to get a consistent supply of great cocoa, which increases the quality of our chocolate,” Kintzer said.

The company works with farmers in various cocoa-growing regions around the world but found, initially that the farmers who were growing the beans didn’t have the equipment or training to evaluate the flavor or quality of their beans– they were simply selling them as a commodity, almost never having tasted the final chocolate product. TCHO wanted to produce chocolates that highlighted the wide range of flavors inherent to cocoa beans, such as berries, nuts, and citrus, but the cacao farmers who’d never really tasted chocolate didn’t know how to produce and select for the flavor characteristics that TCHO was seeking. “For the sourcing process, we would call up the co-op and ask for a fruity flavor profile. They’d send samples, and we’d taste them and reject nine out of ten,” Sweitzer said. “Very inefficient.”

The company responded by developing TCHO flavor labs, small bean-to-bar chocolate making labs, and training farmers to manufacture chocolate in small scale from their cocoa beans, so that they can test samples of their beans to make chocolate they can taste. That gives them the information they need to evaluate their beans, to compare quality in different lots and even to experiment with growing methods. “Right where the farmers are growing the cocoa, they’re better able to understand the quality of the cocoa,” Kintzer said. “This was something that had never been done before in the chocolate world.”

“When a co-op has a TCHO flavor lab, they can conduct regular experiments with their production. For example, segregating and processing one batch versus mixing with producers a few miles away. What would happen if they just pick a certain varietal?” Sweitzer explained. “It really allows them to deconstruct a lot of the harvesting and processing steps and determine how those affect flavor. It’s giving farmers the tools to be cocoa scientists, they even share a lot of this information with TCHO. We’re learning much of this information for the first time as they execute these experiments and share the results with us.”

The farmers benefit from this deepened understanding of their product by commanding a higher price for a higher quality product. “It’s very empowering for farmers to understand the quality of the product they’re offering, and it gives them a stronger position at the buyer’s table,” Sweitzer said. “These TCHO labs allow them to taste all of their product offerings and strategically segment them for their different buyers, regions, and applications. As a result of the labs and trainings, our producer partners truly understand what characteristics TCHO is looking for in cacao beans. Today, we rarely reject samples from these groups. This efficiency allows TCHO to pay a very nice quality premium for the beans they send us.”

TCHO has directly installed 10 of these flavor labs, comprised of simple equipment that can be maintained locally, and the number has grown to more than 35 in Latin America alone as other cocoa co-ops have visited the TCHO flavor labs and taken the concept home with them. Seven farmer co-ops working with TCHO in Peru, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic have received more than $5 million in premiums specifically for quality since they started training with TCHO and tasting their beans, according to Sweitzer. “That doesn’t even count Fair Trade or organic, [for which separate premiums are paid]” she said. “We’re just talking about the money specifically for quality.”

“The TCHO Source Program is the heartbeat of TCHO to ensure that TCHO can get the high-quality cocoa we need and to ensure that our producer partners get the price they need and the tools they need to innovate. It’s putting tools at origin to create the best quality cacao beans possible,” Kintzer said. “When you close the gaps between the manufacturer and the farmers, both sides benefit tremendously. They learn so much from us, and we learn a lot from them, and then we’re both positioned to become better businesses.”

Ruth’s Mustard Named Small Business Champion

Published July 16, 2018

By Lorrie Baumann

Ruth’s Mustard was named an American Small Business Champion in May by SCORE, the nation’s largest network of volunteer, expert business mentors. Laurel Smith, Ruth’s Mustard’s Owner and Founder accepted the award, and a chance to win one of three grand prizes, at an April event in Reno, Nevada, along with her husband, Ed, and entrepreneurs from 101 other small businesses across the country who gathered for a two-day networking and training event that featured presentations by SCORE volunteers who offered information and experience to help attendees grow their businesses.

Founded in 2012, Ruth’s Mustard is a New Hampshire company that’s one of the businesses operating out of Genuine Local, a shared-use commercial kitchen located in Meredith, New Hampshire and owned by Mary and Gavin Macdonald. Like the Macdonalds and some of the other small food producers there, she lost the use of her previous facility when it suddenly closed with little notice.

“When that went out, we were out,” Laurel says. With a four- to five-hour trip to the next-closest available commercial kitchen, that might have been the end of the business, but Ruth’s Mustard was rescued by the Macdonalds’ decision to build the new shared-use facility and open it as Genuine Local. “They bought all the equipment and kept it going and kept us going,” Laurel says. Genuine Local is still a two-hour drive from her home, so she still spends a lot of time on the road on mustard-making days, but that’s just part of the price tag for keeping the business going. “When we make it, it’s a haul, but we want to keep doing it,” says Laurel.

The “Ruth” in the mustard’s name is Laurel’s Grammy Scranton, who used to make her special mustard for family celebrations. “I thought everyone ate this as a kid. I didn’t know it was a unique flavor,” Laurel says. “They’d eat it with ham. It was usually what she put on the ham – just drizzled on. Now people use it for everything.”

Laurel herself started making the mustard without a thought that she’d ever sell it. Instead, she gave jars to friends. And then friends asked for more. They said they’d buy it. Suddenly, she had orders for 61 jars, and she had to step up her production from the eight jars a night she’d been making when she was handing them out as gifts. “We were now up to 24 jars a night to get this order done,” Laurel says.
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The idea was that if they took Grammy Scranton’s mustard into real commercial production, they could use it as a vehicle to help others, as Grammy Scranton herself would have liked. “You always felt welcome, and she always made sure people had enough, and she was always concerned about other people,” Laurel remembers. “When we started this, we didn’t feel like it was ours, so we used her name and put her picture on the label. And we said we’ll make sure we share.”

Today, Laurel and Ed are making nine flavors of mustard in batches of 250 jars. The two of them can make two batches a day, and the mustards are sold in shops across New Hampshire and online nationally – Laurel’s son Cory handles some of the sales. Ten percent of the profits are donated to charities, which have included local charities that serve the homeless, the Make a Wish Foundation and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. “We’ll give 10 percent to feed the need of others, whatever their need may be,” Laurel says. “We feel if you have it and you share it, it comes back. She had the attitude of, ‘Give your best, and God gives you the rest.’”

Ruth’s Mustards’ nine flavors include Original Hot & Sweet, Sweet Grillin’ Glaze, Cranberry, Raspberry, Garlic, Horseradish, Jalapeno, Cracked Black Pepper and Maple Mustard Marinade. In addition to single 7 fluid ounce jars, Ruth’s Mustard also offers three-jar gift sets packed in miniature crates made by Laurel’s son Dwight from recycled wooden pallets and gallons for foodservice use, and she also takes private-label orders. All of the mustards are gluten free, and the Maple Mustard Marinade is paleo. “All of them have vinegar, mustard and sugar – except for the maple. The maple is made with natural organic maple extract in addition to local maple from our area. There’s no coloring or salt – most of them are three or four ingredients,” Laurel says.

Boosted by the experience of the SCORE workshop, Laurel and Ed are looking forward to making good use of the opportunity it provided – whether or not she wins the grand prize that she’d like to have to expand her marketing efforts. “I do want to thank SCORE and Sam’s Club for hosting that small business award,” she says. “Sam’s Club was one of the sponsors.”

For more information, visit www.ruthsmustard.com and look for Ruth’s Mustard on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.