Real Pickles

Northeast Grown, 100% organic, fermented & raw pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, kvass, and hot sauce

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Supporting a Regional Food System: An Interview with Myers Produce

As you may know, here at Real Pickles we are deeply committed to buying our vegetables only from Northeast family farms and selling our products only within the Northeast. One way in which we are able to achieve this, and in turn help to build a strong, organic and regional food system, is by working with small independently-owned regional distributors who bring Real Pickles to our Northeast neighbors.

Annie Myers

With this in mind, we began partnering with Myers Produce in 2016 as a way to bring our ferments deeper into the urban areas of the Northeast, and we’ve been thrilled with the results!

Myers Produce has been in operation since 2013. As a regional distributor based in Vermont, they buy vegetables and value added foods primarily from small, mostly organic farms in Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. They then truck and sell to stores and restaurants in the New York City and Boston areas. Everything they offer has been produced in the Northeast. It’s a beautifully closed loop!

I recently chatted with Annie Myers, owner and founder of Myers Produce, about her experience delivering delicious regionally-grown food to cities in the Northeast. Read about it here, and let us know your thoughts on how regional food fits into your life.

How did you decide to start a food distribution business?

AM: I had been working on a farm in Northern Vermont for about three years at the time, and it had become clear that the farms in my area were struggling to reach markets outside the state. After the local wholesale market was maxed out, our farm considered major supermarket chains to be the best option for increased sales, and the demands of those large supermarket chains were not well-suited to the structure and diversity of our vegetable farm. Although I had been living in Vermont, I am originally from Brooklyn, and had spent some time working in the food industry in New York. I had friends in the city who I knew were looking for a better way to source food grown in our region, and who could afford to pay reasonable prices for that food. After a few years of seeing the disconnect between Vermont farms and high-end urban wholesale customers, I decided to start a business that might connect the supply in Vermont with the demand in the city.

Who are your main customers?

AM: Our produce goes to retail stores and restaurants throughout NYC and the Boston area. Our largest customers are a food co-op, an online retailer, and a fast casual restaurant chain, all in NYC.

Myers Produce NYC deliveryHow many truckloads of regionally-produced food do you deliver to New York City & Boston each year?

AM: We deliver in NYC four times per week throughout the summer and three times per week throughout the year. We deliver to the Boston area five times per week through the summer and twice per week throughout the year. All told this is about 330 truck loads per year!

How has Myers Produce changed over the years since you started?

AM: When we started, the business consisted of me, a van, and a computer, and I was delivering exclusively to NYC customers once a week. We have grown a lot since then! We are now a team of ten employees operating four box trucks. Our mission has remained the same since the beginning – we work to increase Northeast farmers’ access to regional urban wholesale customers, in order to support the strength of agriculture and the regional food system in the Northeast.

How does the seasonality of our Northeast agriculture impact your business?

AM: We have a much less diverse list in the winter than we do in the summertime. We don’t source any products from outside the region, so as soon as a product goes out of season in the Northeast, it is no longer offered on our list. That said, many of our farmers do an amazing job of season extension, and our winter offerings are probably more diverse than you might expect! We have greenhouse-grown spinach, tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes year-round, and we generally have kale, fennel and leeks well into January. And we have added value goods made with locally-grown produce available as well, like products from Real Pickles!

In a relatively short period of time, you have built up a great reputation as a regional distributor. What are the integral aspects to your success?

AM: We don’t know the answer to this entirely, but I think we have prioritized efficient systems, clear communication, and good customer service from the very beginning. I know these things mean a lot to our farmers and producers, and to our urban customers.

Myers ProduceWith all the farms and food producers in Vermont and the Pioneer Valley, how do you choose your offerings?

AM: We don’t have an exact formula, but we try to keep our list diverse and to offer a consistent high quality. We try to source the products that we consider to match growers’ strengths, while also balancing location, price point, seasonality, and scale.

What do we need to be thinking about as consumers and shoppers, in terms of building a strong regional food system?

AM: I know that all of our customers are constantly competing with huge corporate sources of food (Amazon/Whole Foods in particular), and that they are challenged to differentiate themselves in the eyes of consumers. I think the most important thing is for shoppers to be intentional about where they spend their money, and think about who they are supporting by where they buy their food. If we want to support local growers in the Northeast, we need to make sure to spend money where it will stay in regional circulation.

What is the most interesting behind-the-scenes aspect of Myers?

AM: We really only have one physical warehouse space. But, to cover the distances we cover while adhering to regulations – and also create jobs that we think are sustainable – we have drivers based in NYC, Western MA, and VT. All of these drivers start and end their days in the same locations, but they drive from VT to Western MA and back, from Western MA to NJ and back, from Western MA to VT and back, and from Western MA to Boston and back.

What has been your favorite aspect of your job over the years?

AM: I have always loved puzzles, and I’ve grown to enjoy creating systems that are physical, flexible, efficient, and full of moving parts. I love it when an opportunity or inquiry comes up on a given morning, and I get to think about how that opportunity fits into our current operation, send a few emails, make a few phone calls, and be able to take advantage of that opportunity (often by the next day) in a way that makes sense for all parties involved. It keeps me on my toes, and it helps me feel that Myers Produce is providing a real service that can adapt to the needs of the folks that we are trying to serve.

Annie Myers

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Creating Social Change, Together

The extraordinary political events taking place in our country are affecting us deeply here at Real Pickles Co-operative, as they are for so many others. They highlight how far we have to go to build the just, democratic, and sustainable society we wish to see.  We are reminded why all of us here take Real Pickles’ social mission so seriously, and why we must continue to work as hard as we can in pursuit of it.  It is also now as clear as ever that we cannot do this work alone.

One essential lesson of the 2016 presidential election – among many others – seems to be that our economic system is truly not working for many millions of Americans, and that this fact cannot be ignored. The Dow Jones may be up, the economy may be growing, corporate profits and the 1% may be doing great. But many are being left behind. Real change is needed, and the big question is what kind of change will we work toward?

At Real Pickles, we are committed to creating positive social change based on an inclusive vision that prioritizes equality, justice, health, democracy, and sustainability.  We are seeking to build a system that offers real opportunity to all people to live healthy and fulfilling lives.  This means moving away from corporate capitalism and toward an economy where small, community-oriented businesses are the norm.  It means making hatred and discrimination things of the past.  And – urgently – it means doing whatever we can to avoid disastrous climate change.

Thankfully, we are far from alone in these efforts.  A strong example is the New Economy Coalition (of which we are a proud member), whose vision is “a new economy…that meets human needs, enhances the quality of life, and allows us to live in balance with nature…a future where capital (wealth and the means of creating it) is a tool of the people, not the other way around.”  As a diverse array of 175 member organizations, each is pursuing these goals in its own ways, and also coming together wherever and however possible to build on each other’s efforts.  So much essential work is happening within this network, and we are grateful for the opportunities we’ve had to collaborate with such members as Equity Trust, Co-op Power, Cooperative Fund of New England, Cutting Edge Capital, Tellus Institute, Slow Money, and Project Equity.

Our work of creating a more sustainable food system is supported by many thriving organizations.  Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), for example, has been paving the way for countless food and farm businesses here in western Massachusetts to reach success as a result of their highly effective marketing of the “buy local” concept.  The Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG), a 12-state network of over 500 organizations, is leading the way in building a vibrant regional food system.  The Northeast Organic Farming Association and Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association are each in their fifth decade as influential developers of the organic agriculture movement.

We are also encouraged to be seeing the rise of the co-operative movement which is building a valuable alternative to the traditional corporate model.  Worker co-operatives are sprouting up here in western Massachusetts (and elsewhere), with the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives providing a forum for area worker co-ops to collaborate as well as offering assistance to start-ups.  Around the Northeast, we are seeing more and more consumer food co-ops both getting started and expanding, with support from the Neighboring Food Co-op Association – a regional network of food co-ops representing combined memberships of over 107,000 and annual revenue of $240 million.

While the primary focus of Real Pickles’ work is the Northeast U.S., we recognize the importance of maintaining a national and global perspective, as well.  We admire and support the grassroots climate activism of 350.org, and have participated in climate marches in NYC and Washington DC.  The National Co-op Business Association, a national trade group of co-ops, is doing important work developing and advancing co-operative enterprise both in the U.S. and internationally. The Cornucopia Institute is providing the public with essential reporting highlighting both the problems of industrial agriculture and beneficial practices of family-scale organic farmers.  Over the past year, thousands have been camped out on the front lines protesting plans to build the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation (we recently made an exception to our Northeast-only distribution commitment to send a donation of fermented vegetables to the protesters).

Addie Rose at 2013 Climate Rally in DC

We’re deeply fortunate to be working with so many effective partners who share our commitment to a just, democratic, and sustainable society.  At the same time, we know that our approach to creating social change, as well as the scope of our own network, represents merely a narrow slice of what is happening and what must happen if we are to truly achieve our vision.  In the months and years ahead, we commit to redoubling our efforts to create real and positive change by building on the work we’re already doing and by seeking out new connections and partnerships across our region, nationally and globally.  We hope you will join us.

 

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Calculating Food Miles at Real Pickles

In the course of preparing our latest annual report, we learned some interesting things about how far Real Pickles products travel from farm to fermentation to fork!

Annual Report – Fiscal Year 2015

Since Real Pickles’ beginnings in 2001, one of our key social commitments has been to source our vegetables only from Northeast farms and to sell our products only within the Northeast.  We do this because we want to promote the development of strong local and regional food systems.  There are so many good reasons to be getting our food from closer to home – freshness and nutritional value, food security, strong agricultural economies, climate change, and more.  And, as I’ve written about here, it’s not just local that’s important but regional, too.

We’ve always had some sense about how far Real Pickles products travel from farm to fermentation to fork, but we’d never before really tried to figure it out.  For our most recent annual report, we decided to go for it.  We posed the question, “What can a business do to build a strong local & regional food system?”  We offered up our answer: “source locally & regionally…sell locally & regionally!”.  And, then we got to work with the calculator and spreadsheets to ascertain just how far – on average – our vegetables traveled from farm to fermentation last year, and how far our products then traveled from fermentation to fork.

Upon delving into the project, it quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to come up with precise numbers.  The reality of food transport involves all kinds of complexities that we could never fully sort through.  But, we could arrive at some useful estimates that would illustrate the difference it makes when a business commits to sourcing and selling within a region.

Farm to Fermentation

Determining the average distance that our vegetables traveled last year from farm to Real Pickles was the more straightforward of the two calculations.  We received a total of 128 vegetable deliveries from ten farms – beginning with the first load of cucumbers from Atlas Farm in late June, ending with our last drop-off of storage beets from Red Fire Farm in February.  For the purposes of the calculation, we assumed that all vegetables traveled straight from the farm to Real Pickles, with no other deliveries along the way.

Organic. Local. Cabbage. Ready to ferment!

The result?  The 285,000 pounds of vegetables used to make Real Pickles products from the 2014 harvest traveled an average of 17 miles from farm to fermentation!!  We’re very excited by this number.  Of course, it’s also what we’d expect given our commitment to working with suppliers like Riverland Farm (13 miles away), Atlas Farm (7 miles away), and Old Friends Farm (22 miles away).

What if we made no commitment to sourcing from Northeast farms?  Real Pickles would likely be buying vegetables from much farther away.  Most of our cabbage, for example, would be coming from major cabbage-producing areas like California, Texas, and Mexico.  In that case, our cabbage would be traveling thousands of miles from farm to fermentation.

Fermentation to Fork

CJ loads the Real Pickles van for local deliveries!

Figuring out the average distance from fermentation to fork was a more challenging task.  Nearly 20,000 cases of Real Pickles products traveled to over 400 stores last year.  Retailers here in the Pioneer Valley – like River Valley Co-op and Foster’s Supermarket – receive their pickle orders via the Real Pickles delivery van.  While those further afield – such as the Park Slope Food Coop and Martindale’s Natural Market – get their Real Pickles products through our distributors or via UPS.  We couldn’t possibly know exactly what route each jar of kimchi or sauerkraut took to get to each store last year, nor can we know the route each jar traveled to get to our customers’ plates!

We do, however, have good data on how many cases of Real Pickles product were sold to each store last year.  So, we mapped the driving mileage from Real Pickles direct to each of our top 50 retailers – which together sold about half of our product last year.  (We made the assumption that doing the calculation based on this group of stores would yield a reasonably accurate result, while saving quite a bit of time.)  Then, we used our sales data to calculate an overall weighted average for distance traveled.  Based on this approach, the final result was pushed higher by fast-selling stores in places like New York City (~175 miles away), while kept lower by nearby stores selling lots of our pickles in such towns as Northampton, MA, and Brattleboro, VT (~20 miles away).

When all the math was done, we learned that Real Pickles products traveled an average of 131 miles last year from fermentation to fork!

We’re pretty excited by this number, too.  As a growing business producing an ever more popular food (fermented vegetables), we know we could easily be shipping our Real Pickles products thousands of miles all around the country.  But, we also know there are so many important reasons to be sourcing and selling regionally.  When we consider that our 20,000 cases last year traveled an average of 131 miles – rather than 1,000 or 2,000 miles – we know we’re making a difference.

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Beyond Local: The Case for Regional Food

Where should we get our food from?  How far need it travel?

These are essential questions for anyone who wants a better food system – one that is ecologically sound and socially just.  After all, a big impetus for the rapidly growing movement to transform the food system is the modern-day reality that places like New England – quite capable of raising such crops as apples or tomatoes – will instead import them from thousands of miles away and burn up large quantities of climate-changing fossil fuels in the process.

Long-distance food transport brings other drawbacks, too.  By getting our food from California or New Zealand, we’re often giving up on flavor and nutrition because those distant farms are growing crops that were bred, first and foremost, to be shipped.  Farms supplying national or global markets also tend to become big and concentrated, and thus are more likely (organic or not) to be engaged in industrial, monoculture practices, rather than the kind of agriculture that supports healthy soil, healthy crops, and healthy ecosystems.  And, of course, eaters in this kind of food system are left hopelessly disconnected from the source of their food, which brings all sorts of unintended consequences.

As local as possible

Buy local! This has been a primary response to the crazy, unhealthy, industrial food system we have in this country.  Leave behind that bad supermarket food shipped in from who knows where, and go get to know your neighborhood farmer.  The push to buy local is taking the burgeoning new food system far.  Countless farmers markets and community supported agriculture farms have come into being.  More and more restaurant chefs are buying ingredients from local farms.  Local food has even begun to make its way into schools and hospitals.

The idea of buying local makes sense in many ways.  If our food system is broken and a central problem is that we’re sourcing from thousands of miles away, the obvious response is to switch to getting our food from as close to home as possible.  And if the disconnect between farmers and eaters is a serious problem, we should start buying our food from a farmer who we can actually meet face to face.  There’s a logic to it, and this indeed is an important part of the solution to building a new and better food system.

Is “buy local”, however, the end of the story?  Is the right way to create the food system we need to buy as local as possible every time?  It’s an increasingly popular idea.  These days it serves as the basis for commissioned studies and marketing slogans suggesting that single small states – even single towns – might feed themselves almost entirely.  But, I think the real answer is more complicated.

Urban and rural

A trip to a pickle festival in New York City a couple of years ago got me thinking about the issue in a new way.  Addie Rose and I traveled to the Lower East Side to set up the Real Pickles booth at the Peck Slip Pickle Fest, a special one-day event at a public food market called New Amsterdam Market.  During a short break between pickle sales, I got a chance to walk the market, and was struck by how different it was than the farmers markets back home in western Massachusetts.  In rural western Massachusetts, farmers and other food producers typically travel ten or twenty miles to get to a farmers market.  Here at New Amsterdam Market, I noticed that the vendors – vegetable farmers, cheesemakers, maple syrup producers – were coming from a much greater distance.  Some had driven 100 miles or more from various points in the Hudson Valley.  Others had traveled even further, coming down from the Finger Lakes or Northern Vermont.  There were a few vendors with products made in Brooklyn, but few if any were using agricultural ingredients produced local to the city.

None of this came to me as a real surprise.  A place like New York City – with its urban development stretching for many miles – obviously can’t support many real farms anywhere close to its borders.  But, it got me thinking about all the talk about being a “locavore” and switching to a “100-mile diet”.

For those of us living in rural places like Vermont or the Berkshires or Maine, it’s remarkably easy to become convinced that solving our food system’s problems can be wholly accomplished by the act of buying as local as possible – and organic – in an effort to create a multitude of insulated, local food systems.  And, yet the point of changing the food system is not to create an elitist alternative for a limited subset of the population.  The point is to bring about a transformation that gives everyone the opportunity to participate in and benefit from a healthy, just, and sustainable food system.

If everyone is to be part of the new food system, then I think we need to keep this fact in mind: the majority of the U.S. population lives in concentrated urban areas whose local agricultural resources are entirely inadequate to support the food needs of their populations.  For those in and around cities, then, the task of sourcing food from much closer to home means re-building the food system on a regional level.  Instead of local food systems with a 100-mile radius (as many choose to define “local”), this means focusing on regional food systems with, perhaps, a 250- or 500-mile radius.

Those of us in rural areas – rich in agricultural resources – thus have an inescapable responsibility.  As we do the necessary work of helping to overhaul the food system, we must consider what part we can play in feeding the populations of places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.  While it is surely tempting (and so much simpler) to focus inwardly and exclusively on how to feed merely ourselves, that is not, in the end, the way to build a better food system.  It is essential to be actively promoting and supporting our local farm economies – and, at the same, we need to be thinking more broadly.

Resiliency

There’s another strong reason why we need to think regionally as well as locally, one that undermines the notion that it would even be possible for any one town or small state to securely depend on its own agricultural resources.  It has to do with things like weather and pests – those unavoidable factors that make farming inevitably risky and unpredictable.  Factors which also threaten to make farming even more unpredictable as a result of climate change.

The changing pattern of cucumber growing here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts helps to illustrate the issue.  Dave from Chamutka Farm in Whately has been growing pickling cucumbers (among other crops) since 1980.  Before that, as a kid, he helped out his parents and other local growers raise them for the old Oxford pickle plant in nearby Deerfield.  Dave, who was Real Pickles’ first cucumber supplier, has witnessed the harvest season for local pickling cucumbers shrink dramatically in recent years.  When he first started growing, he could harvest cucumbers all summer long, typically going into mid to late September.  By the time Dave started supplying cucumbers to Real Pickles in 2001, cucumber harvests would last at least until early September.  Over the last decade, however, it has come to be a crapshoot to expect a harvest beyond mid-August.  For Real Pickles, that means pickling all of our cucumbers for the entire year (60,000 pounds in 2013) within a single six-week period.

What’s steadily squeezing out our local cucumber season?  It’s a disease called cucurbit downy mildew, which blows in from the southern states each summer and, just about overnight, wipes out the cucumber crop.  These days it’s showing up much earlier than it used to, a trend that is likely to continue as the climate warms.  As UMass Extension vegetable specialist, Ruth Hazzard, explained to me recently, human attempts to breed cucumber plants resistant to it have been failing to keep up with downy mildew’s rapid evolution via genetic mutation and natural selection.  In the future, cucumbers could become a much less reliable local crop.  And yet, as downy mildew does not typically reach all parts of the Northeast (check out these maps illustrating its recent impact), it may still be a reliable regional crop.

Differences in weather (and its effects) from one locale to another point us in a similar direction.  Tropical Storm Irene barreled through the Northeast in August 2011 and brought epic amounts of rainfall.  Small rivers flooded immediately, and within a few days, major rivers started overflowing their banks – leading to crops losses for numerous farms located along riverbanks (where the best soil is).  Three of the six farms that regularly supply Real Pickles had flooded fields and ruined vegetable crops.  It was a disastrous event for many farmers – though not for all farmers in the region.  For one thing, Pioneer Valley farms located on higher ground tended to fare better during Irene.  Looking regionally, the storm was a disaster for farms in such places as Vermont, the Hudson River Valley, and western Massachusetts.  But, farms in many other parts of the Northeast – further from the track of the storm – emerged relatively unscathed.

Last season, farms in our area had to contend with one of the rainiest months of June in memory.  About ten inches of rain fell here in the Pioneer Valley that month, adversely affecting our local food system in a variety of ways.  The direct effect on Real Pickles was that 20,000 pounds of summer cabbage that we had planned to buy from one of our local farms rotted in the sopping fields.  While our local farms had all experienced similar weather, farms in some other parts of the Northeast had not.  The same week that we got the local cabbage news, we received a call from our friends at a farmers co-op in Pennsylvania and learned that organic farmers down there had produced a bumper crop of summer cabbage.  We bought enough to fill up a tractor trailer – making the transport as energy efficient as possible – and were able to make the batches of sauerkraut and kimchi that we needed.

These examples all drive home the same point:  While a global industrialized food system is clearly not a resilient one, neither is an entirely local one.  If we are to build a better food system, resiliency must be among its central features.  The inevitable conclusion, then, is that we need to make a shift toward regional scale.  We must move away from the hopelessly unhealthy, inefficient, and insecure reality offered by our current global food system.  And we also need to properly account for the impacts of weather, pests, and climate change – and do our best to ensure that everyone can be reliably fed.

Local and Regional

The work of building the new food system that we need involves a wide array of priorities – like reducing corporate dominance, expanding organic production, and shifting to healthy, minimally processed foods.  Cutting back dramatically on long-distance food transport is another top priority.  Here, we need to engage in food system development on two scales: local and regional.

How do we do this?  CISA recently put out a fantastic guide, Eat Up and Take Action for Local Food, outlining all the many ways one can help build up our local food economies.  Buy locally-grown food, support access to it for low-income folks, become a local foods entrepreneur, invest in a local foods business.  There is plenty of important work to be done.

On the regional level, a key task is to build up the regional connections between farms, processors, distributors, retailers, and eaters.  At Real Pickles, we enjoy working with and supporting three family-owned distributors – Angello’s, Regional Access, and Associated Buyers – all of whom do a great and efficient job of connecting Northeast family farms and producers with retailers throughout the region.  (I mention “efficient” because regional food distribution can, in many cases, outcompete local food distribution when it comes to minimizing energy consumption, a key consideration.)  We also make a point of keeping in touch with Northeast farms outside the Connecticut River Valley, so that we are prepared whenever those inevitable weather challenges arise.  We primarily buy our vegetables from local farms, but we can turn to Pete’s Greens in Vermont or Tuscarora Organic Growers in Pennsylvania if we need to.

Encouraging retailers and eaters to support local and regional products is important, too.  For years now, “buy local” marketing campaigns have been successfully raising awareness about the benefits of supporting local farms.  It may be time for “buy regional” campaigns, as well.  At Real Pickles, we honor our original commitments to buy our vegetables only from Northeast family farms and sell our products only within the Northeast.  This is our way of publicly promoting the idea of regional food systems.  We would love to see many more food businesses making similar commitments!

If we want a better food system, then we must be sourcing our food much closer to home.  The food system is complex, however, and simple prescriptions will only take us so far.  Responding to the reality of global food transport with the call to “buy local” is extremely important.  If, however, we are to truly to change the food system – the whole system, not just the margins of it – we must also develop a regional perspective.  By doing so, we will help to ensure that our food system can be healthy, secure, and sustainable.  And that it can be so for everyone!

NOTE:  If you’re interested in learning more about regional food systems, I recommend checking out the work of Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG).  In particular, you’ll find excellent in-depth papers on the topic here and here.  For a number of years now, NESAWG has also been helping to build a Northeast regional food system through their annual conference, It Takes a Region.

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A Community Perspective: Keeping It Local!

Margaret Christie is a rock star.  Especially when it comes to our local food system here in western Massachusetts.  As executive director of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) in the late 1990s, she oversaw the launch of the hugely successful “Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown” marketing campaign.  In her on-going work as CISA’s special projects director, Margaret plays an essential role as researcher, thinker, and organizer in the effort to build a better food system – locally and beyond.  Here, Margaret offers her perspective on the social benefit of Real Pickles’ decision to go co-op.  Thanks, Margaret, for your kind and insightful words!  

by Margaret Christie, Special Projects Director, CISA

Why is Real Pickles’ decision to go worker co-op good for the rest of us?  If they keep making good dill pickles, ginger carrots, and sauerkraut, do we care who owns them and how that ownership is structured?  Yes, we do—not only because of the impact this business will have, but because the folks at Real Pickles are showing us how we can be involved in building a better food system.

The change in Real Pickles’ ownership provides a number of collateral
community benefits, but most important may be the model of business success they offer.  As we work together to create a network of farm and food businesses that provide more of the food we eat every day here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts (and the surrounding region), we often focus on business start-ups, not on what follows success.  But what happens to a business that starts with a commitment to sourcing regionally or sustainably grown ingredients as the business matures?  When the owners are ready to do something else—or just to shoulder a little bit less of the burden of keeping the business going—how can their commitment to regional sourcing be maintained?  Real Pickles’ decision to form a worker co-op models one answer to this important question.

Every month, I attend meetings of the PVGrows Loan Fund as CISA’s representative.  When local farm and food businesses apply to us for financing, we review a list of criteria that represent our mission of “enhancing the ecological and economic sustainability and vitality of the Pioneer Valley food system.”  Among our concerns is long-term commitment to the Pioneer Valley.  If we finance a new business, will they continue to source from local farmers in the long run, or will they decide that it’s less expensive to find their ingredients in the global marketplace?  Or might they move altogether, finding both cheaper ingredients and cheaper labor?  When evaluating loan applicants, we often have no way to assess the owners’ long-term commitment to our region.

Real Pickles’ new ownership structure, in contrast, provides two clear answers to this question.  First, the business will now have multiple owners, all relying on its success for their employment, and unlikely to choose to ship their jobs someplace else.  Second, they’ve codified their commitment to regional sourcing and regional sales in their bylaws, and made those bylaws very difficult to change.  Rather than getting big and getting bought out by a larger corporation with, perhaps, a stronger commitment to their shareholders’ profits than to our local economy, Real Pickles has strengthened their commitment to our region while restructuring their ownership.

Real Pickles’ action reminds me of a courageous step taken by another Franklin County business more than a decade ago.  In 1998, a group of Franklin County dairy farmers decided to form a co-op and market their own milk to local consumers, becoming Our Family Farms.  They introduced the milk by giving out lots of free samples, explaining that it came from their own farms, right down the road.  There wasn’t much fanfare then about locally grown food, but the response was clear: the milk was delicious, and local residents understood that supporting businesses in their own communities benefitted the local economy.  Many farmers and farm advocates in the region took notice.  At CISA, when we started the Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown campaign the following year, Our Family Farms’ success gave us confidence that the campaign would resonate here in the Pioneer Valley.  CISA is now celebrating our 20th anniversary, and the founding of Our Family Farms was a critical milestone on the road to the Local Hero campaign and the explosion of interest in local food and farms.

I expect that Real Pickles’ decision to form a worker co-op—and the campaign for investors which will finance the shift in ownership—will play a similarly important role in the growth of our local food system.  Growth and success can lead to a renewed commitment to our region and the health of its farms, workers, and local economy.  And as residents of this region, some of us can do more than applaud and eat pickles:  we can finance this growth from within our own community.

For more information about Real Pickles’ co-op investment campaign, visit www.realpickles.com/invest.

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Regional Distribution: An Interview with Joe Angello

At Real Pickles, we have always had an unconventional approach to distributing our fermented vegetables, choosing to work with small independently-owned regional distributors rather than large national ones.  Angello’s Distributing, based in upstate New York, was the first distributor to carry our products.  I recently talked with Joe Angello, its founder and owner, about his experiences in the natural food industry and what it’s like running a regional distribution business.

KH: Why did you decide to start a food distribution business?

JA: It was a reaction to the consolidation of natural food distribution.  Northeast Cooperatives had just been purchased by UNFI [United Natural Foods] and a clear monopoly was being established.  We were recognizing that good local producers had no access to the market.  The only way was through UNFI and they were more focused on national brands.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on a business plan.  If I did, Angello’s might not have happened.  I’m more of a jump in and do it kind of guy.  I borrowed a truck and was working out of the cooler at Hawthorne Valley Farm.  Later I found space at Clermont Fruit Processors in a building that had been in agricultural use for over eighty years.

KH: What does Angello’s look like now?

JA: We have fifteen staff people, both full and part time.  We run two to four trucks.  Produce wasn’t our original intention but we started the business at the height of the season and within a month it became obvious that people were interested in fresh, local produce.  I came from fifteen or twenty years in the fish business.  Fish is expensive and perishable and the intensity level and competition is high.  Produce can be hard but it’s easier than fish and we really worked on how to make it as fresh as possible.

Produce accounts for about 40% of our sales now.  We also distribute dairy, grass-feed beef, baked goods, fermented foods and some beverages.

Our core customers are independent natural food stores and co-ops in the Hudson Valley, North Jersey and the Berkshires.  What we do resonates with the end user customer.  Shoppers really look for and appreciate good quality organic foods.

KH: Angello’s has been distributing Real Pickles since 2004 – before my time at Real Pickles.  How did Real Pickles and Angello’s first start working together?

JA: One day in the early days of Angello’s I ran into a guy I knew doing a delivery.  He had been the Northeast Cooperatives delivery guy when I had worked at the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store.  He was grumbling about the UNFI purchase and I said, “Come on over. We could use some help”.  It was a rough time in our business.  I think he might have introduced us to Real Pickles.  He definitely introduced us to Paul Harlow at Westminster Organics.  Real Pickles and Angello’s stand for the same thing on different parts of the food chain.  It’s one of the brands we’ve had from the beginning that keeps carrying on, and the relationship keeps get stronger.

KH: What do you see as the biggest challenges for independent and regional food producers and distributors?

JA: Marketing is one of our biggest challenges, both for producers and distributors.  We go head to head with major corporations like General Mills and Kraft Foods, who have an unlimited amount of marketing money.  Most all of these companies are giant publicly traded stock companies.  Is that really where we want our food dollar to go?  Those of us who work in regional food all need to be looking at ways to pool our interests so that we can better promote the independent brands that get passed over by the big guys.

KH: What do we need to be thinking about as consumers and shoppers?

JA: We need more public scrutiny about what’s inside the package.  People like Michael Pollan have been doing that and Vandana Shiva has been doing it on a global level.  We need to make high quality food a priority – for the health of our environment, the health of ourselves, the health of the economy.  The idea that cheaper food is better food is deep in our psyche. That has got to get thrown out the window.

If you spend an extra twenty cents on a six ounce yogurt to buy yogurt from a dairy in your region rather than from a multi-national brand, where is that money circulating?  How is it impacting our society, the environment and where we live? What’s really happening?  These are important questions to ask.

KH: Is there anything else interesting about Angello’s that we might not know?

JA: We care about these issues at the international level too.  We’ve been importing chocolate from the Grenada Chocolate Company.  The chocolate bars are actually made by a cooperative in Grenada.  Extreme things like child labor and slave labor happen in the chocolate industry, particularly in the Ivory Coast which produces 40% of the world’s cocoa supply.  There’s a great documentary called Nothing Like Chocolate that looks at these issues and features the positive things being done by the Grenada Chocolate Company.

KH: What has changed in the industry since you started the business?

JA: When we got started there was not much of a consciousness or awareness of local food.  We didn’t recognize it as a trend. It’s not why we started. For us it was more common sense.  All this stuff is here and you can’t buy it in the stores.  It didn’t make any sense. 

We were in the right place at the right time.  There was more awareness starting around 2005.  Banks still had money so we were able to buy our building.  We couldn’t do that now. People started to be really interested in local.  Have you been into a Walmart recently?  Everything says “local”. Banks and insurance companies talk about being local.  It’s like the word “natural”. It gets to be ridiculous.

KH: What should we know about food distribution that we probably don’t know?

JA: What appears at face value to be a simple task of getting a jar of pickles from Greenfield, MA to Clermont, NY to getting to a retail shelf in New York City is extremely complicated.  There are so many ways for that not to happen.  We’ve been doing it well and doing it continuously.

Giant companies have done a good job of keeping their costs at a level that is hard to maintain at a smaller scale like ours.  It’s more difficult than I think people realize.

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Good Food Awards speech: “Pickles Are Not Obsolete!”

Addie and I are just back from the Good Food Awards in San Francisco, where we were honored for the 2nd year in a row for our Organic Garlic Dill Pickles.  While our first experience at the Good Food Awards in 2011 was quite special, this time around we were fortunate enough to receive an additional honor:  Real Pickles was selected by our 10 fellow pickle winners from around the country to deliver the acceptance speech for the group!  (Thanks, picklers!)

At the ceremony, each pickle winner was called up to the stage and received a Good Food Awards medal from renowned chef and food activist Alice Waters.  And, then I delivered the speech:

Thanks very much. My partner Addie and I are thrilled to be back at the Good Food Awards for a 2nd time as part of what is again a fantastic pickle posse!

I think pickles are a really great fit with the Good Food Awards, with its focus on helping to bring good food back into the American diet, promoting both taste and social responsibility.  Pickle-makers in the United States have much to offer on both counts, and I would say the winners here tonight are clear illustrations of that.

Those engaged in the craft today are drawing on pickling traditions from around the world to produce tasty pickles, as three of tonight’s winners did – Farmhouse Culture, Spirit Creek Farm, and Firefly Kitchens – in creating a version of the Salvadoran classic, curtido.  And we are drawing on the American pickling tradition, as Cuisine En Locale did to produce their winning pickled peaches (which I’m very excited to try).

Some of us here (like Olykraut) are using the traditional fermentation process to make our pickles, while others (like Miss Jenny’s and Let’s Be Frank) are using the modern vinegar approach.  Both are great ways to preserve the wonderful flavors of organically-grown produce and indeed to enhance those flavors along the way.

Pickle-makers are also making major contributions in the realm of social responsibility.  Our special tool of course, our not-so-secret weapon, is our ability to take perishable fruits and vegetables and make them non-perishable, and yet still tasty and nutritious.

In an industrial food system – with monoculture farming and long-distance food transport (both made possible by cheap fossil fuels) – one might be tempted to wonder if pickles are obsolete.  I mean, why bother with making dill pickles for winter when we can just buy in cucumbers from Mexico, right?  Part of the answer, of course, is:  Who really could live without pickles?  (I know, I might be a little bit biased.)

But, as it turns out: pickles are not obsolete anyway.  Because, as more and more Americans are coming to realize, our industrial food system is broken.  It doesn’t work.  It’s causing or exacerbating a huge list of ecological and social ills, from climate change and soil erosion to human disease epidemics and the decline of our rural economies.  What we need instead is a regionally-based organic food system where everyone (not just the privileged few) has access to healthy food from small producers located (whenever possible) within their own region.

And in such a food system, pickles are an essential food:  one that can keep people eating nutritious fruits and vegetables from regional sources all year long, regardless of how cold the weather gets.

Our contribution to building a regional, organic food system is an important part of what we pickle-makers are being honored for tonight.  So many of the winning producers here have developed close relationships with their local farmers to source their ingredients, as we have done in Massachusetts at Real Pickles, Sour Puss Pickles has done in New York, and Emmy’s has done here in California; while others are growing ingredients themselves, like Ann’s Raspberry Farm.

And, thus, just as practitioners of each craft being honored here tonight are contributing to the task of making “good food” the norm in America, so too are those of the pickling craft.  And, I think I can safely speak for all of my fellow pickle winners when I express sincere gratitude to the organizers of the Good Food Awards for doing your part to help promote our work and achieve wider recognition for it.  So, thank you very much.

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Why Our Food System Needs the Occupy Movement

Here in western Massachusetts, we are fortunate to be part of a community brimming with exciting efforts to build a new and better food system.  Farms of all kinds are starting up or heading in new directions: offering winter CSA shares, doing on-farm cheese or yogurt production, growing grains and selling them to local bakeries.  Non-farm businesses are using more local ingredients in their restaurants or using them to produce value-added foods like salsas, meads, and (in our case) fermented pickles.  New retail markets are forming for local/regional foods, such as winter farmers’ markets and a new food co-op.  Non-profits are doing tremendously valuable work, as well, whether encouraging people to “Be A Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown” or running an incubator kitchen for start-up food businesses.

To someone like myself who sees enormous social value in transitioning to a regionally-based, organic food system, these developments are very encouraging.  And, of course, such activity can be found in many other communities around the country (and beyond), not just in western Massachusetts.

In my view, this is an approach to social change that can produce substantial progress.  Small farm and food businesses create the building blocks for the new food system.  People generate increased market demand by choosing to buy their products.  Non-profit organizations help in all sorts of ways.  The momentum starts to build as more people come to be exposed to the benefits of a regional, organic food model–as more people get to taste the really good food it puts out, as they see the farms in their communities beginning to thrive.  And in time, people can even come to perceive a new food system taking hold (at least at the margins), and imagine the possibility that the corporate, industrial food system could truly be replaced.

But, while this work on a local/regional scale to start building the replacement for the current food system is hugely important (I would not have started a pickle business if I thought otherwise), I don’t see a true transformation of the food system happening by this avenue alone.  We also need something like…well, the Occupy movement.

The Cheap Food System

A key challenge in trying to change the food system is that our political-economic system offers enormous advantages to the purveyors of industrial food.  The result is that the big food corporations can sell their products for extremely low prices.  With healthy, regionally-produced, organic food made to look expensive in comparison, it becomes difficult to compete.  Those who see the benefits–and have the ability to pay–will buy regional, organic food.  But, as long as we have a cheap food system, local efforts to change things will only be able to convince so many people to switch to the good stuff.

Of course, cheap food is not actually cheap.  It’s just that a portion of its cost is being paid for at someplace other than the supermarket checkout.  Our taxes, for example, fund the billions of dollars in subsidies–mostly going to the largest farms–for commodity crops like corn and soybeans, whose by-products can then serve as cheap ingredients for processed foods.  Our ever-increasing health insurance premiums pay the bills for the diabetes and obesity epidemics caused by high-fructose corn syrup and other refined sweeteners.

Other costs are being substantially passed off to future generations.  The current-day farm practices which are causing our agricultural soils to erode away ten times faster than they can be regenerated will mean less farmland from which our grandchildren will be able to feed themselves.  And, the burning of fossil fuels to transport our food thousands of miles from farm to plate will result in an outsized burden for our descendants as the effects of climate change further unfold.

These are the kinds of “externalized costs”, as economists call them, which constitute the unfair advantage of corporate, industrial food.  (Regional, organic food has such costs, too, but to a far smaller degree.)  Until eliminated, this advantage will continue to stymie efforts to fundamentally change the food system.  And yet, those working on a local/regional scale–as opposed to a national scale–are not going to be able to change this equation.  This is where we need the Occupy movement.

There are, of course, the more everyday tools for effecting national political change–lobbying, petition drives, electoral campaigns.  And, use of such tools has yielded some progress, as illustrated by programs in the Farm Bill promoting local food and conservation (as limited as they may be).  But, as I see it (and I’m clearly not alone), not enough progress has been made.  The problems of our food system are serious and urgent, and the ever-increasing influence of money in politics makes the prospect for serious change by everyday means very slim.  Our food system needs a non-violent, direct protest movement that views our society’s challenges in a systemic way and demands serious change.  The kind of change that would mean an end to the excessive advantage and influence held by corporations in our food system–and in our society as a whole.   Our food system needs the Occupy movement.

Food as a Right, Not a Privilege

There is a second reason why our food system needs the Occupy movement.  If we are to finally succeed in stripping the big corporations of their unfair advantage–the ability to pass off to society the social and ecological costs of their activities–then most of us are going to find our food costs increase.  Having learned just how expensive “cheap” industrial food really is, we will have substantially switched to healthy, organic, regionally-produced food.  The price on that delicious tomato from the organic farm down the road will finally beat out the price on that pale, sad excuse for a vegetable (or fruit, to be precise) flown in from who-knows-where.  But the local, organic tomato will still cost more than the industrial version used to cost.

For many people–I would venture to suggest the clear majority of Americans–this will be a manageable adjustment.  It will require a re-alignment of expectations about the percentage of household income spent on food: perhaps Americans will end up devoting closer to 24% of income on food as we did in the 1920s, up from the 9% we currently spend.  Many millions of Americans, however, will be able to handle this–especially when one considers all of the societal costs which will have been avoided (societal costs, of course, eventually translating into individual costs like taxes and insurance premiums).

Still, a substantial number of Americans will not be able to afford higher food prices.  Many of them cannot afford food even at current prices.  Thus, what is already an imperative will become even more critical:  that access to food be made a right, rather than a mere privilege.  Every person deserves to be able to afford to eat healthy, nutritious food, and we as a society need to figure out how to make that an assured reality.  This is not something that those involved in local efforts to change the food system can do much about.  Communities can develop good food pantry networks or organize fundraisers for low income shoppers at farmers’ markets, but they’re in a poor position to institutionalize food as a right.

The Occupy movement, however, can help get us there.  Just as with corporate advantage, this is not a challenge that is likely to be overcome by everyday petitioning and lobbying efforts.  Establishing access to healthy food as a right will come only as part of a bigger societal shift.  And, such a shift is precisely what the protesters at Occupy Wall Street have been talking about from the beginning.  As stated in their Principles of Solidarity: “We are daring to imagine a new socio-political and economic alternative that offers great possibility of equality.”  This is about moving toward a society in which it is not just the 1% that are guaranteed to eat.  100% are guaranteed to eat.

If, then, we are to build a truly new food system, I suggest this:  Let us be engaged, wherever we are able, in that much-needed work of creating a better structure from the ground up–buying local/regional, starting or supporting small farms and food businesses, developing community gardens, joining support organizations.  And in our broader-scale efforts, may we not give up on the standard citizen tools of the political process (letters, petitions, etc.).  But at this moment, let us also give serious consideration to how we can best support and participate in the Occupy movement and help to chart its future direction.

After all, we are the 99%.  It’s our movement, too, regardless of whether or not we have yet joined a single street protest.  This is a moment with great potential to effect serious social change and move us toward becoming a more equitable and sustainable society.  May we make the most of it.

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Lessons from a Muddy Season

Dave Chamutka of Chamutka Farm recently harvested the last of his 2011 cabbage crop and delivered it to our door.  By the next day, those cabbages were all peeled, cored, shredded, salted, and fermenting in barrels.  It was the final batch of vegetables for the year for us.  We’re now stocked up until next season – the cooler is full of packed cucumber pickles, the warehouse extra-full of barrels of fermenting cabbage, beets, and ginger carrots.

This particular November, it’s a bit of a relief walking through our warehouse and seeing all those barrels full of locally-grown vegetables on their way to becoming pickles. Given how heavily we depend here at Real Pickles on the success of the local farm harvest, there was a lot of uncertainty this season about how things were going to go.

The first concrete indication that 2011 might be a little different came in June when Gideon Porth from Atlas Farm called up to say that he was re-seeding his entire main crop of pickling cucumbers, and so we should expect a delay in the harvest this year.  Many of the cucumber seeds had just rotted in the mud, as spring had been so cool and wet.  As we got further into the season, we learned that the spring weather had affected many of the other crops we were waiting on, as well.

Once July hit, the weather got hot and quite dry for awhile.  But, the dry weather, of course, was not to remain.  In late August, Irene dumped epic amounts of rain on all the farm fields in the area.  Within a couple days, the Connecticut River was overflowing its banks and flooding fields at three of the six farms we work with (among many other area farms).  Harlow Farm, in Westminster, VT, was especially hard hit – a significant portion of the farm was underwater before the river finally receded.  The sky was blue within a day of Irene’s passing, but many more inches of rain came down in the weeks following.  By the time Dave Chamutka was ready to start harvesting his cabbage in late September, his fields were so muddy he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get in there to cut them.

In the end, though, we managed to fill all those barrels with top quality, delicious, locally-grown, organic vegetables.  Amazing!  Despite the odds, the area’s local farmers came through for us.  Gideon re-planted those seeds and went on to grow us plenty of beautiful pickling cukes.  Dave and his crew had to walk those first heavy crates of cabbage all the way out of the muddy field before being able to finally drive a truck in, but in the end managed to deliver to us what we needed to stock up on Organic Sauerkraut for the year.  The losses at Harlow Farm included carrots we were planning to buy.  But, we struck up a relationship with Joe Czajkowski, a third-generation farmer in Hadley, MA, who was able to fill in so that we could keep making our Organic Ginger Carrots.

We are always appreciative here of our local farmers, but in a year like this one we are especially thankful.  This season we were reminded of the challenges of committing to buying our ingredients only from local farms.  If we hadn’t been able to get enough cabbage, then come next spring we would be running out of several Real Pickles products.  But, even more, we were reminded of how resilient a well-developed local/regional food system can be.  After all, local farms still produced a tremendous amount of food this year, despite the adversity.

Resiliency is one reason why local/regional food systems make so much more sense than our dominant industrial one.  This has much to do with diversity and decentralization, as opposed to monoculture and centralization.  In our centralized industrial system, the majority of lettuce consumed in the United States is produced monoculture-style in Salinas, CA.  As a result, when the weather in Salinas is bad for lettuce, suddenly an important food can become scarce and expensive as far away as New England.  An even worse situation ensues when scary pathogens like E. coli 0157:H7 (whose appearance seems to be a direct result of industrial agricultural practices – see Michael Pollan for details) show up on a crop like lettuce.  With agricultural production so concentrated, such contamination quickly leads to widespread illness and nationwide recalls.

But, the diversity and decentralization that come with local/regional food systems promise to make us far less vulnerable than that.  On farms producing many different crops, rough conditions in a given year are likely to impact certain ones but are unlikely to impact everything.  In the huge October snowstorm we experienced recently, Atlas Farm’s two-acre lettuce crop got squashed by the snow, but their other autumn crops survived.  In a decentralized food system, a critical crop shortage experienced by a particular region in a given year could likely be rectified by sourcing from another region.  No one need starve.

A food system’s resiliency does not stem solely from diversity and decentralization, however.  As I think about all of those cucumbers the crew at Atlas Farm managed to harvest for us after such an inhospitable spring, and about all the heads of cabbage that were coaxed to maturity in the mud at Chamutka Farm, I am reminded that it is also the skill, tenacity, and creativity of the farmers that make a food system resilient.  Those farmers worked especially hard this season.  We at Real Pickles wish them a good winter’s rest!

Fermenting Since 2001