Grey County local food wholesale venture snowballs
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
by JIM ALGIE
In the year since planning began for a local food wholesaling system for Grey County produce, it has grown from eight farmers to 30, established an interactive, online market place and, most recently, distribution arrangements with a broker based in the Greater Toronto Area.
What Chefs Forum needs now, organizer Linda Reader said in a recent interview, is more growers and as much as four times more produce. The group plans a high profile celebration of its first year with a local food tasting event at Grey Roots Museum near Owen Sound, beginning at 5:30 p.m., Jan. 20.
The event features samples prepared by four area chefs using products from Chefs Forum growers. As well, it will feature short video presentations about nine growers involved in the project and produced by Toronto-based writer and nutritionist Theresa Albert.
“Basically that night is to celebrate what we’ve done in a year,” Reader said.
She also wants to create buzz among new growers. A recent arrangement with Toronto-based distributor, 100km Foods Inc., means the forum will need to ramp up production in 2014.
“The people who have been playing with us in this playground now for a year will probably have to quadruple what they’ve been producing to meet the need,” Reader predicted.
Paul Sawtell’s six-year-old local food distribution firm has grown quickly from himself and his wife, Grace Mandarano, to a staff of 10 and a fleet of five trucks. From sales of $250,000 in their first year to more than $2 million last year, Sawtell has ridden the local food phenomenon into a serious, long-term business connecting small scale growers with high-end Toronto restaurants. He needs more growers.
“We’ve just scratched the surface in terms of clients,” Sawtell said in an interview about a clientele that includes chefs in major hotels such as The Four Seasons and The Royal York. There are thousands more restaurants in Toronto alone where the appeal of local food is taking hold, he said.
“I think conventional food favours the big guys, big retailers, big producers,” Sawtell said. “Generally speaking the small and medium-sized farmers they haven’t done their own distribution and they’re kind of left out of the equation,” he said.
Reader is an economic development consultant based in the Flesherton area who has helped manage the project that began with closed-door trade shows introducing chefs and farmers. Chef/farmer Michael Stadtlander, whose world famous restaurant Eigensinn Farm is also in Grey County, attended an early session organized by Reader and advised the group to concentrate their distribution effort on chefs.
The trade shows led to commercial arrangements for a wide range of Grey County produce, everything from ducks to micro-greens, sheep’s milk cheese and mushrooms. An interactive Chefs’ Forum website began operating last summer with Ontario government financial support. It allows farm members to advertise available products and commercial buyers to arrange purchases. In early December, forum officials, who operate with an advisory board of farmers, completed arrangements with 100km Foods for a collection site in Flesherton for distribution to GTA customers.
Beekeeper Hugh Simpson, who has shipped his Osprey Bluffs honey through the collection centre and is a member of the advisory board, said distribution is an important step in the search for viability among small-scale farmers. A former banking/insurance executive who began farming full-time in 2008, Simpson now runs a 250-hive, honey operation and is a board member of the Grey County Federation of Agriculture.
“I’m using it now and what it does for me and other producers is it bolts on that piece that producers typically do not have the skill set or the time to do,” Simpson said of the new distribution system. “That is develop sales and marketing tools and relationships required to move your product . . . up to a point where you are working closer to the consumer where the margins are better,” he said.
Reader hopes more growers will pay the $50 membership fee and participate. The group has applied for provincial government funding to set up a food hub but has yet to hear the result of its grant application. Interest from Sawtell convinced the forum to proceed sooner than expected using temporary arrangements with a restaurant at Flesherton’s main intersection.
Reader hopes to operate with 75 growers by year end as they develop confidence in the demand and in the organization. Simpson expects a learning curve.
“It’s not something that’s going to happen to the level we need it to happen within the first year,” he said. “We think this is a program that will take three years to get to that critical mass where we’ve got a real vibrant community of producers with lots of experience and lots of commercial buyers plugging in to that community.”
“It’s good idea but it’s a new idea,” Simpson added. “The notion of a new idea sometimes trumps a good idea . . . and it takes time to take hold.” BF