Neil Keeble, BeeKind Honey Bees
Neil Keeble, BeeKind Honey Bees
Rising costs, changing market demands, food sustainability and consumer interest in more locally-crafted options have led many farmers and growers to wonder how they can do more with what they already have.
Everyone wants more local, healthy food, but no one will sacrifice taste, yet it’s hard for new producers to break into foodie circles; regardless of the yummy factor they offer.
Andrea Gray-Grant, CEO of Good to Grow, an organization devoted to helping B.C.-based food and beverage businesses, has assisted a number of farmers, growers and processors establish solid roots in the food and beverage processing business.
She also delivers insights to take further growth steps when the time is right. Having been there herself, Gray-Grant had her own processing business before she started helping more than 1,000 brands find their sweet spot.
“It’s not like I’m reading a textbook and telling them how to do it,” she says. “I’ve done it myself. When you walk into this business, you want to look at whether this product is viable.”
The latest program added to Good to Grow’s lineup was the Hatch Your Farm and Food Business workshop.
The first occasion the six-part, day-long training was presented was well-timed to help businesses gain a foothold on their plans and strategies for the busy farmers’ market season.
It also preceded the organization’s From the Ground Up trade show on May 18 at the PNE forum in Vancouver, which serves as the place to be to find what’s new in B.C.-produced food innovations.
Both are places where new businesses can get started in the food and beverage market.
“You need to take a workshop like this so you can plan for the future,” Gray-Grant says of the workshop.
The workshop, funded by Vancity and designed and delivered by Good to Grow for the BC Association of Farmers’ Markets, helps businesses figure out how to start out and do it in a way that allows for easier growth. The basics include things like understanding pricing so that if selling to retailers is in the future, the foundation is right.
“Let’s start at the very beginning and the very beginning is the farmers’ market,” she says.
Ron Glave of BeeKind Honey Bees in Revelstoke attended the inaugural workshop and found the information well-suited to his business’s current position. He started operations in 2019 supporting commercial beekeepers by rearing queens and creating nucleus colonies.
“As a bi-product over the past four years, honey production is a part of what we do and this year it became a primary focus,” he says. “We’re transitioning from farm gate, direct-to-consumer, to now being retail-ready, and part of that now includes attending farmers’ markets.”
An opening for goods coming from bees at the Revelstoke market gave Glave the chance to take the spot and bring his own hive products.
He says it’s a thriving market and he appreciated the insight from the workshop into how to set up, interact with customers, and establish a strong position.
“That was the main hook for actually attending the training,” he says. “To see if there’s something that we’re not already thinking about.”
Beyond knowing how to best set up at the market, he appreciated answers to all the logistical elements that pile up at the eleventh hour, or worse, that crop up at the market itself.
“Do I need to go invest in a thermal printer so I can print a receipt? The answer is no. Do you put an individual tag on things or can you just go with price sheets?
“Price sheets are the norm,” he says. “It was refining what we thought about farmers’ markets. It gives you the confidence that, yeah, we actually got this.”
Having the information beforehand to make intelligent decisions allows people like Glave to consider the future. Gray-Grant wants workshop attendees to contemplate the growth potential even if they never progress past farmers’ markets as their outlet.
“Maybe you’ll never leave the farmers’ market,” she says. “Lots of people do that, but, when people come to me when they’re much further along, it’s so hard to get out of that.”
The workshop includes market etiquette, how to bring people in and how to design the booth. Subsequent workshops help scale growth.
She wants to see people succeed, so if Good to Grow doesn’t offer what a business needs, she has been known to point people in the right direction.
At the From the Ground Up trade show, husband and wife Murray and Susan Kirkpatrick of Kirkaberry Farms in Midway, B.C., showcased numerous products made from haskap berries.
The former hay farmers from Alberta wanted to do “something different,” so upon reading an article about the fringe berry that grows on a shrub, they bought 5,000 plants in 2010 and just kept going. They now have more then 51,000 plants on their 806-acre farm.
“There wasn’t a productive acre on this land when we bought it,” Murray says. “We cleaned it up and planted Christmas trees for the farm tax break.”
The first good harvest from mature haskaps was in 2015. Initially, the berries were sold locally, but the opportunity for growth was apparent. The Kirkpatricks loved the berries and knew they were filled with antioxidants and other healthy benefits, so they dove into freeze drying and high-pressure processing to retain the nutrients and expand the market opportunities.
“Now we have healthy products all the way through,” says Susan, adding that being at the show was intended to help introduce the berry and its potential to more people and buyers. They already have one Vancouver-based restaurant that buys products from them.
With a processing facility on-farm, they have the ability to make juice, freeze-dried berries, freeze-dried powder, puree and a variety of snack products (like haskap yogurt and ice-cream bites) that make use of the freeze-dried process.
The facility is CanadaGAP certified with CFIA approval, and Kirkaberry is able to ship products across North America. They’ve even been creating wine, and while a licensed winery, they haven’t started selling that product just yet.
The couple hopes to see the rest of the world grow more familiar with the very versatile haskap berry.
“We gotta make people aware that we have such a wonderful berry to work with.” says Murray.
At the show, their samples were readily offered to introduce people to the deep rich flavours the berry can produce.