Image: JORDAN SILVERMANWhat's cooking at two innovative centers for entrepreneurs of the edible
BY SARAH TUFF
Fairfax just might be the best-smelling village in the state, surmises Andrew Czeck. He’s the production coordinator for the Vermont Food Venture Center, which sits directly across from Foothills Bakery. On any given day, the aromas of maple, honey, tomato or garlic waft out the windows of the two-story building to mingle with the yeasty fragrance of fresh bread.
On one recent day, though, it reeks of vinegar. Inside the Center, Jeff Mitchell of Vermont Pepper Works is cooking up a batch of Hempin’ Jalapeño Pepper Sauce, the latest addition to his line of hot stuff. A brew of hulled hemp seeds, tomatillos and jalapeños simmers in a 40-gallon kettle while Mitchell, jamming to classic rock, single-handedly fills bottle after bottle from a giant sieve. By the end of the day, he’ll have nearly 1000 bottles capped, sealed, labeled and ready to ship to gourmet shops and fiery-food aficionados all over the U.S. Despite the vinegar smell, the sauce is delicious — earthy and spicy.
The Vermont Food Venture Center (VFVC) was founded in 1996 by the Economic Development Council of Northern Vermont, a St. Albans-based nonprofit that serves the state’s six northernmost counties and recognizes the gourmet market’s potential for growth and employment. “Food processing is the second-largest source of manufacturing jobs in Vermont, behind electronics,” says the Center’s project director, Brian Norder. “If you have 100 specialty-food operations, with three or four people each, that’s a Husky plant!”
Mitchell’s company is one of some 30 specialty-food businesses that come here each year to test, store, chop, bake, freeze, fill and ship their products. From Ethiopian hot pastes to caramel creams, the fruits of their labors fill specialty-food shelves in stores from coast to coast. And their ideas might have died on the vine if it hadn’t been for “incubation” time at the VFVC.
“It’s a phenomenal place,” says Colchester’s Joe Forziati, who spends about two days a month here preparing his Nonna Luna pasta sauces. “I didn’t have a clue how to go about it — like testing pH levels for shelf stability — before.”
Indeed, the Center’s 3000-square-foot dream kitchen is like a Willy Wonka factory for chefs, with 60-quart Hobart mixers, a bathtub-sized pasta cooker and two Blodgett ovens that can accommodate 30 trays of granola each. A state-of-the-art fruit processor stems elderberries and cores baked apples. Users share the space; diced vegetables, cartons of eggs and peeled garlic chill in the walk-in cooler, while bags of puréed squash sit in the blast freezer, which flash-freezes foods with temperatures of minus-20 degrees Fahrenheit. The place is a tantalizing resource for anyone with a serious interest in starting or growing a specialty-food business in Vermont.
And it helps to have a head for math. The global market of U.S. foods is $4 trillion, and a new product is launched every 20 minutes, according to the book Developing New Food Products for a Changing Marketplace. But new ventures are risky: It can cost between $35,000 and $100,000 annually for three years to get a small gourmet operation off the ground. Industrial kitchen equipment can cost up to $10,000.
But here at the Center, after an initial free consultation, clients pay just $25 an hour for use of the equipment. And every three hours paid include two hours of help from Andrew Czeck.
“The VFVC has meant the world to my business,” says Mitchell, who began cooking sauces in 1999 after a bumper crop of cayenne peppers appeared in his Hyde Park garden. “Between the start-up information and guidance, industry resources and affordable rental, it would have been tough without them.”
The help provided by the VFVC seems to be paying off: While nationally more than 90 percent of new product-introductions fail, 70 percent of the Center’s clients, past and present, are still in business. Their stories are on display upstairs in the wood-paneled office: River Run sauces in glass whiskey flasks, sacks of Moo-fin mix, Mapled Nut maple-sugar almonds, Hillside Lane Farm’s Maple Passions body syrups — in a busty bottle that Czeck says is “real popular around Valentine’s Day.” One woman cooks green-tomato chutney as a hobby; one guy comes in to make cases of barbecue sauce for family and friends around the holidays. And then there are those like Moosewood Hollow’s Claudia Clark, the Plainfield-based creator of infused maple syrups who has landed her products on the pages of The New York Times.
The Center is busy all the time from mid-May through early December, accommodating an average of two businesses each day. During the slow season, Czeck conducts a “once-a-month-cooking” program, during which busy professionals can prepare 20 nights’ worth of food, from meatloaf to pistachio-encrusted halibut, in a single day and then freeze it for later consumption.
The Center’s kitchen has seen surprisingly few disasters or failures. Pipes have burst, a bottle of ketchup has exploded, and one poor fellow accidentally poured 10 gallons of homemade honey down the drain when he forgot to close a valve on the kettle. As for the products: maybe an overly acidic bean dip here, a watery blueberry jam there. “And we’ve had a couple ones that are real nose turners,” says Norder. “Some of the marinades that people are convinced are great and you taste it and think, ‘Ugh! Who’d put that on anything?’”
Before businesses begin producing at the Food Venture Center, they often test out products at a smaller kitchen at the Northeast Center for Food Entrepreneurship (NECFE), which is housed at the University of Vermont’s Carrigan Hall, part of the nutrition and food-sciences department. A partnership between UVM and Cornell University, NECFE also allows Food Venture Center clients access to food-science services, some of which are provided at no cost.
Conducting a brief tour of the Burlington facility one recent afternoon, Norder pulls open a large refrigerator to reveal a half-dozen goat legs lined up like the Rockettes in a Christmas spectacular. “They make this in Lombardy, Italy,” he says, pulling out a leg for an appreciative whiff. “It’s called violini di capra because they tuck it under their chin, like a violin, to carve. Tastes like super-rich prosciutto.” Pride of Vermont, a group of goat and sheep producers, is testing out goat hams as a potential entry to the U.S. market.
In an adjacent room, fat cylinders of cheese glisten from metal bins; a three-day advanced cheesemaking workshop is in session — one of many hands-on learning experiences NECFE offers to budding entrepreneurs. Workshops — on food allergens, start-ups and selling skills — take place once or twice a month at UVM and typically cost $50.
Funded by a four-year, $3.8-million USDA grant, NECFE began in February 2000 and has been drawing flocks of curious chefs to its “Recipe to Market” seminars. At one such recent gathering at Carrigan Hall, three New York college students wanted tips on selling their secret “vodka sauce” (actually made with another liquor), while Cameryne Kelly of Shelburne sought new outlets for her chocolate-filled pastries, called “Little Treasures.” Kath-leen O’Shea, who’s opening up a new shop near Okemo, shared her dream to become the Ben & Jerry’s of soup. Sid Das of New Hampshire flipped through charts showing the possible market for his Indian sauces.
Considering the success rate of NECFE and the Vermont Food Venture Center, it’s a good bet some of their specialty foods will one day be staring back at you from a local grocery-store display. But which ones? “It’s hard to predict the trends,” says Norder. “We’re seeing growth in Indian, and African has a huge potential.” According to Czeck, salsa production has cooled off in the past few years. Maple is perpetually one of the most popular ingredients, and even Jeff Mitchell has added a touch of maple to his new roasted apple sauce, to roll out in early 2004.
Some Vermont specialty foods have grown from “good potential” to “award-winning.” Last month, Jeff Mitchell’s Rancho Ancho sauce topped hundreds of international entries, taking first place in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s annual Scovie Awards — so-named for Wilbur Scoville, who pioneered a rating scale for spicy foods. While Mitchell’s competitors concoct near-lethal elixirs with novelty labels that end up as collectibles, he focuses on creating condiments that will land in the belly, in liberal doses. His bottles are larger than most and the graphics are subdued. “There are shops that won’t carry my stuff because it won’t burn you or kill you, and because of the bottles,” he says. “The label is a high-end, arty thing rather than someone’s ass on fire.”
For more information on
the Vermont Food Venture Center and its products, visit www.edcnv.org/vfvc.htm or call 849-2000.
For more information on
the Northeast Center for
Food Entrepreneurship, visit
www.nysaes.cornell.edu/necfe
or call 656-8300.
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