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Small Bites
January 31, 2025
Creating opportunities to support & amplify regional food systems, not only in Vermont while responding to the reduction of Federal services that impact our food and economic security. Encouraging sharing of your radical response to these uncertain times.
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The first two weeks of the year differ vastly from the past 12 days. The rampant dismantling of our federal government will continue reaping havoc with yet to be determined impacts. Right now, in Vermont there is a similar feeling of uncertainty as five years ago at the beginning of the pandemic. A foreboding of our nation experiencing something so new, so different, so unknown.
The same menacing exists now with many people directly impacted since January 20th, & many indirectly but unsure just when their lives will be upended. So, with a heaviness among us, we recognize the Networks that exist in the farming & food space in Vermont are made up of thoughtful, caring people across the entire spectrum of our general population & that includes non-profits, philanthropy, businesses, academia, & government. Our collaborative & strategic planning will continue responding to the new administration’s daily upheaval.
A common term describing exploitative governments that function poorly for their citizenry while disproportionately benefiting a corrupt elite group or individual: Banana Republic. By all appearances the richest men in the world are effectively deconstructing 250 years of democracy. impacting its citizens' health & wellbeing for the benefit of a few.
Adaptations will be made to our plans that serve the spectrum of needs for Vermonters & to continue supporting partnerships across the New England food-landscape. There is so much unknown, but readers of Small Bites are caring & concerned citizens who will continue to respond with kindness & strategic thinking to make our world a good place, despite the president's modeling & mandate for us to do otherwise.
In the words of Robert Riech & very much in alignment with our honorable senior Senator Bernie Sanders:
"What Trump is undertaking has nothing whatever to do with conservatism, which is about conserving institutions and shrinking the size of government. And it has nothing to do with populism, which is about confronting elites. Trump is leading a move to replace democracy with oligarchy.
Read on for topics of interest across the farm & food economy as we roll into February on a wave of systemic upheaval impacting all sectors.
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New & Emerging Brands for Retail Sales
New products continue to come to market. That is part of what drives local & regional sales. One aspect of food manufacturing is early-stage imagination & nurturing ideas & creativity.
Pushing the food concept beyond pure imagination require wide-ranging skills needed to build a customer base that then in turn helps to drive future sales through multiple sales channels (stores, institutional, direct to consumer, distributors etc).
At the recent expansion celebration of the Roots Farm Market in Middlesex, VT new & emerging brands were front & center with samples & product demos. The owners of three relatively new brands attended; Vermont Fermentation Adventures (VFA), Umamiso, & Mama Tree Farm Ancient Grains met with current & future customers of their unique artisan-crafted products.
Emerging brands tend to sell to stores with direct to store deliveries- DSD. This allows for meeting store staff & building alliances . Umamiso delivers to Meadow Mart in Montpelier, a revitalized neighborhood store combining convenience foods with a mix of Asian inspired products. VFA delivers to stores including the South Royalton Coop, building the brand one store at a time.
Explore each of these emerging brands' websites for info.
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2025 The Year of Values
How about a little love as an antidote to the uncertainties & fears circulating. Ahh, the February endcap full of chocolates & dainty love-based products at Morrisville Food Coop.
An end cap is an effective strategy to bring attention to short-term promotions. Creating a theme with products aligned includes consideration of the store (or department) pricing & margin goals. Creativity & a bit of "theater" as a design concept will help drive the promotional sales. The endcap should not feature too many products: streamline your choices to increase sales opportunity.
Purchasing products for end caps generally include distributor specials- either monthly or weekly. The mix can carry a range of margins that is determined by the purchasing team & promoted through marketing teams. Vermont stores focus on mixing & matching end cap promos to include Vermont products intermixed with national brands.
With a wee bit of planning any store can create sale endcaps (even if it is not exclusively on an aisle end). Keep it simple, pay attention to your pricing & margin goals, maintain them with ongoing stocking. Definitely don’t run the same display for more than a month: preserve the promo opportunity of the space by rotating products to retain customer interest & engagement.
Well-constructed end caps are going to be especially valuable as shoppers seek out lower prices in 2025. Prices are expected to continue to rise with national food labor impacted by this week’s decisions across all sectors of the economy.
Read more on end caps from Jay Jacobowitz’s Retail Insights & from the Retail Collection of Farm to Plate.
| The biggest impact from running a sale is usually two to three weeks. After this, your promotion runs out of steam, & shoppers are ready for something new. -JJ | |
Now More Than Ever!
For more than 15 years non-profits & charitable streams of giving have been focused in Vermont to support food production & distribution into retail stores. The efforts have paid off with farms & food manufacturers benefiting from a food hub network to expand access to processing kitchens & deliveries to stores.
Brattleboro's Food Connects, Hardwick's Food Connex, Newport's Farm Direct, the Route 7 western corridor has ACORN & VT Farmer's Food Center & Healthy Roots services NW Vermont. Each organization has benefitted from federal funds & private grants to accomplish positive results. The reliant on charitable & federal enhancement programs have a collectively created a valuable network to service our rural state
Each organization has a unique model, & each works across the supply chain strengthening access to local food.
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In Newport, the online ordering platform of Farm Direct has a small yet mighty team driving sales of products across food categories.
This food hub sells a wide range of products- of course produce -but also small-scale chocolate manufacturer Prophecy in Morrisville. The chocolatiers support indigenous organizations across the Americas as well as production practices of mission-aligned businesses.
Another company selling through the hub is Vermont Bean Crafters, well known bean-based products sold widely throughout the NE region through larger broadliners including USFoods & Sysco.
Our food business community is wide ranging & vital to the health of our food hubs with the range of products reaching nearly every corner of the state.
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Say Cheese, Please!
A mere couple of miles from the Canadian border is the Boucher Farm, a renowned family-run multi-generational dairy operation with deep roots to the land for nearly 100 years.
Their award-winning raw milk "blue-style" cheeses are made & aged on the farm in Highgate. Here is a cool, little-known fact about them: They milk at 4:30 in the morning, from the milking parlor the milk is transported through a pipeline directly to the cheese processing vat. The milk is still warm from the cows. The fresh milk is made into handcrafted wheels then aged to perfection. As part of the affinage process, each wheel of cheese is hand-salted, pierced, & aged at least 60 days.
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Reaching cheese buyers across the nation, their cheese is widely available to stores in New England through Provisions International & Performance Food Group dba Black River Produce; & in Vermont & NYC through Pumpkin Village Foods.
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Supply & Demand (& Patience!)
Growing a food business is an exercise in patience, skills building, & learning the things you didn't even know you would need to know.
Finding the buyers who will give you a chance to prove yourself is key. Inde stores & Coops can be a great fit for emerging brands. Learning to perform so that you can produce your goods to meet expectations from the buyers is also super important. Repeat buying grows your sales.
Often home kitchens are the starting point, but they are a steppingstone as more efficiency is needed when sales increase. It can be a long & draining search for a production kitchen to meet all the needs of a growing business. At Birch Hill English Muffins, they ended up in that place.
Strong sales & DSD relationships at loyal stores demonstrated demand. Looking for a new production facility became a frustration, & a lesson in patience. Unable to find suitable space, despite over eighteen months searching resulted in a change of focus. The facility search & expansion plans on the back burner for now, allowing for flexibility as Eric & his wife get ready to welcome their first child in mid-April!
It’s not a problem of demand, only of supply! I know there’s a very viable path to build this business, it might just come down to being patient for the right space to come my way.
-Eric
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Gaining sales skills is imperative to effectively meet buyers or potential consumers of your products. Through federal support mechanisms VAAFM has helped food manufacturers gain marketing skills via the Tradeshow Assistance grants program. The deadline to apply is coming right up. Get the details here.
Regional tradeshows matter too. In Boston, the SBN’s 2025 Local Food Trade Show Tuesday, January 28th is the place to connect regional New England producers & buyers in. Along with a wide range of producers, there will be buyers at grocery stores, specialty food shops, restaurants, distributors, institutions, farm stores, & CSAs. Join SBN to attend the meet up at Russell’s Garden Center in Wayland, MA.
(snow date: February 4th)
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Organics & Federal Funding Freeze
From The Organic Trade Association: Along with our business members and nonprofit partners, OTA is deeply concerned about the recent OMB memorandum pausing federal grant and financial assistance programs. Many farms and businesses have already spent funds and are awaiting reimbursement—funds they were legally promised.
A disruption of any length threatens critical investments in farm infrastructure, manufacturing, technical assistance, and market development. We urge Congress to work with the administration to quickly resolve the confusion and broad blanketing of such important investments in American agriculture.
Read more here
| Costco shareholders rejected a proposal urging the wholesale club operator to evaluate risks posed by its diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) practices. More than 98% of shareholders voted against the proposal during their annual meeting on Jan. 23. Other companies continuing DEI as of Jan 23, 2025 | Another fabulous turnout of farmers & vendor/suppliers at the annual VVBGA meeting! | |
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Fear & Loathing:
The Economy
Most people don't think about farm labor & housing issues, immigrant laborers working the land in every weather condition, federal labor programs, third party trucking logistics & regulations, regional distribution centers & consolidation, or even shipping strikes. Others of us geek out on this stuff.
2025 will shed light on the complex systems that get food from farms to stores. This includes all federal support services & the dedicated career civil servants running programs across administrations. As seen since January 20th the road is tumultuous, scary, fear-driven, mean, & unchartered.
The long list of recent decisions framed by our oligarchs is designed to weaken the separation of powers across our three branches of government giving the president immediate & unprecedented leverage. In just 12 days we already feel the impact to the foundations of our diverse economic system, the real fear & pain felt by so many directly in the firing line.
We cannot separate “local from global” & the emphasis this week is on “reacting” to what happens when federal money is removed from every sector. What lies ahead is the unknown impact on global trade; this will absolutely impact ingredients & product supply sourcing on Vermont specialty food.
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2025 Store Support Services & The VT Grocers Project
This year we are shaking up our winter sessions for farmers, food manufacturers & stores. The past two years we offered a series of online trainings but this year, food manufacturers have other options we are promoting (see below!).
Offered online, Farmers as Retailers will have periodic one-offs with dedicated topics. Stores will be able to sign up for intermittent peer-based sessions of our newly hatched Shop Talk. This short series will tackle issues pertaining to inde stores & smaller coops which will address topical issues expressed by the store operators & associated with rural demographics. Details & sign-ups will follow in future Bites.
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In-store services will continue to be offered utilizing a team of consultants to address specific concerns for stores. Reach out if you are interested in more.
With this brief introduction enough to speak your interest, feel free to drop an email to smallebites802@ gmail.com to ensure you receive info for either series, Farmers as Retailers or Shop Talk for stores.
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Mission Alignment:
2025 a Time of Reckoning
For the past 15 years, many farm & food adjacent businesses & non-profits have come to rely on Meta to highlight their businesses, gain traction & share promotions on Instagram & Facebook. Small Bites included.
The idea has been it had value reaching audiences & sharing information. But things have taken a fast-track change for many individuals & mission driven organizations.
There are too many nails in the coffin- depending on any number of reasons including but not limited to Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on loosening reins on third party fact checking & content moderation around political discourse. There are the manipulative algorithms, the fast-lane spread of misinformation, the allowable hostilities, the amplification of divisive narratives including MAGA toxic masculinity, & Nazism. The values are out of alignment with those we allegedly hold. It is of course not only Meta, but X which is testing the moral character of us all.
We have reached the time of reckoning.
Meta has been moving to the extreme right & X has proven it is a haven for exclusionary policies in contradiction to those held by an increased number of now former users. Lately with the emphasis away from diversity, equity, & inclusion there is a sense of dread trying to fit personal & professional values with reaching customers.
For those who have considered leaving to uphold their values, there is movement to other social platform Substack & Bluesky, & revisiting direct email marketing as a way to connect with their customers & readership to stay connected.
“I have seen a steady stream of folks abandoning their profiles as well, especially in the last couple weeks as Meta has dismantled DEI & speech protections for those most vulnerable online.”
| This warehouse debacle feels a bit like the USA these past 12 days. | |
Big Picture
From the Road
Despite farm laborers in hiding to prevent ICE raids & deportation, this week there has been no significant lack of inventory through from California produce farms. That will soon change. Additionally, a longer term supply- chain impact is the lack of tree pruning & vine maintenance for stone fruits, apples, & grapes. No farmworkers. No Food.
Local Food in a Global Marketplace is going to hit home as trade tariffs will impact our farm & food manufacturers with higher costs. This of course intersects with our distributors & retail stores. There is a chance that some smaller producers may have to shift their value-aligned missions to source from other vendors just so they can stay competitive.
If the first two weeks of the new administration are any guide, there will be many new production & cost variables across the supply chain which might influence production & procing variables. Low overhead, cost control & financing variables will impact viability of many businesses.
Large scale supermarkets are trying to control their price image & margins as (not surprisingly prices did not drop on January 20th). Everyday Low Pricing, long a retail strategy for stores across the conventional & natural channels have sought to share "basics" at low pricing. Right now, that strategy require a lot of attention as eggs, long known as "an affordable protein", are exceeding $7 a dozen in many areas. Local small farm egg farms are even higher priced at retail stores.
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From the Road
Closer to Home
Partnerships & relationship still matter. Adding sales to existing stops benefits our small inde & food hub distributors. Adding new products is a risk, yet one worth taking as it it invites expanded alliances with buyers across stores, both large & small.
Our VSFA listserv helps bridge knowledge gaps as was recently acknowledged by Bard & Bellam. They were seeking info on distribution. Low & beold, they are now working with PVF. The organic Southwest inspired spice blends seasonings are available in shakers & packets. Up to now, they have DSD to stores but now, are expanding distribution to reach retail stores already buying from Pumpkin Village Foods. Grab samples, to give them a B&B a try!
Every distributor has its unique pricing structure. Sometimes the largest operations have extremely high margins on local/regional products. Smaller distributors with mission aligned values to support the economy can literally deliver lower prices. It is often thought the larger operations will have lower prices because of volume. Not true. Store buyers need to price compare, service compare, & mission-align compare!
Selling more organic, grass-fed, Larson's Yogurt from well-loved animals to the Northeast metro areas is a 2025 goal. The yogurt market is competitive, the A2 product runs at the higher price point, but prices can be dropped at the retail end when prices are lowered by distributors. Farms & food manufacturers are learning that distributor "trade spend" & payment terms need to be considered.
Another distribution variable we hear about is getting into large multinational supermarket chains. There are various onboarding procedures & vendor expectations, again unique to each enterprise. Some vendors have to manage their inventory & stock their products, to save labor at the supermarket. Some chains allow vendors to sell (& stock) to a limited number of stores on a DSD route. Vendors need to be aware of the labor that it will cost them to maintenance the accounts.
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Advice for CPG Brands
2024 Panelist at the Producer Distributor Buyer Forum: Greg Esslinger, is a born teacher. catch his "deductions are his life" daily advise on Linked In.
"Something I see with so many brands - especially the brands that haven't been dealing in retail for long or have little experience with distributors. Is the lack of ability to remember what they've committed to. They often fill out paperwork for a promotion 6 months in advance or even commit to a free-fill and then never think of it again. Until BAM! they get hit with the chargeback. And while most of the time there is this realization that they did this .... often enough the brand has forgotten the details or even ever submitting paperwork to run that specific promotion in the first place." -GE
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Partnerships Matter in Growing Food Businesses
Collaborating to help our food businesses succeed in a changing economy requires building alliances & sharing resources. The Center for Women & Enterprise, The Vermont Specialty Food Association, & Center for an Agricultural Economy created Power Forwardas a 13 week accelerator program for businesses ready to roll up their sleeves & learn new tools to grow your business. See if you meet the qualifications.
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Regional NE Partnerships
Grow Food Sales
Western MA Food Processing Center & the Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts collaborate on an annual winter training series.
Designed for early-stage, yet established food entrepreneur selling a consumer packaged good (CPG) or value-added product in the northeast. Most businesses start by primarily selling direct to consumer & need a leg-up with "readiness skills" to begin selling to stores regionally. (The 2025 session is underway)
It covers many of the topics the VT Grocers Project covered in our 2023 & 2024winter series in . However, it digs deeper in Cost & Market Analysis, & Marketing & Branding
Many NE brands have gained business development skills including Sales Strategy & Developing Relationships with Store Buyers along with Pricing & Profit Margins. These collaborations have often been funded through Federal support programs including from USDA market development grants. This week Federal funding sources were immediately halted by the new administration. This speaks to the lack of knowledge of how federal tax dollars benefit business growth. (The billionaires now running the government incidentally received copious public funding for research into developing products & technologies which directly benefitted them.)
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Did you Know?
Farm to Plate's events/news/jobs page is a go-to list to connect & learn. Check it out regularly & share your good stuff too! Ooddles of updates that can include agroforestry, women farmer summits, butchering seminars, staffing news, & so much more.
VSJF offers business management coaching, entrepreneurial support, & training to position Vermont entrepreneurs for growth and long-term success. Check it out!
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Special Thanks: Seth & Julian @ Pumpkin Village; Lenny @ AGNE, Karin & John Roots Farm Market & Bear Roots Farm; Kayleigh @ Boucher Farm, Lauren @ Brownsville Butcher 7 Pantry, Miranda @ Momo's Mkt
Created with gratitude for the support from the Canaday Family Charitable Trust
Small Bites comes to you via incredibly valuable grants. It is created for farmers, food manufacturers, distributors, & grocers to increase VT food sales.
Please share your bits to include as a Bite!
We directly support the New England State Food System Planners Partnership effort to strengthen the regional food economy.
Contact: Annie Harlow
smallbites802@gmail.com
All info is subject to change. Is it time to get really radical in your work?
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