Seminars help farms, firms get food to shoppers’ plates

One-day classes coming up on three islands will help fledgling farmers and food producers get their product to market, and not just Whole Foods Market.

The national chain store and the nonprofit Kohala Center on Hawaii island are working to cultivate the next generation of artisanal producers with SPROUT Hawaii, a series of three daylong seminars.

“We’ve been working in Hawaii for five years now, building partnerships over that time,” said Claire Sullivan, Whole Foods Market coordinator for purchasing and public affairs. “What we realized is that we wanted to share with both the existing pool and with aspiring folks some of the lessons that we’ve learned over the five years.”

Products from nearly 300 local suppliers can be found “in every department of our stores, but our ultimate goal for this event is to have more,” said Dabney Gough, marketing supervisor for Whole Foods Market Kailua. “We want to really help make it easier for more local suppliers to get off the ground, for us to carry them on our shelves.”

Whole Foods Market offers a Local Producer Loan Program to help companies with capital expenses. While the program has not yet directly benefitted any of the store’s Hawaii suppliers, “we do have several in the pipeline. It’s exciting,” Sullivan said. “It’s not a grant program, but it is a means by which Whole Foods Market can help small companies get access to capital.”

Beyond that, though, the SPROUT program is designed, like a rising tide, to lift all boats and help the local companies get into other retail stores as well.

Kohala Center, the co-organizer, “does work that really benefits farmers and producers throughout the state,” Sullivan said. The Kauai SPROUT session will be primarily run by the Kohala Center with some support from Whole Foods, she said. For the Maui and Oahu events, however, Whole Foods Market will be doing most of the heavy lifting.

While there are as yet no Whole Foods Markets on Kauai or Hawaii island, “we are very pleased to have supplier and relationships on all major Hawaiian islands,” Sullivan said.

In planning SPROUT Hawaii, Whole Foods reached out to successful local vendors to find out what they would like to gain from the event. As such, some of them will be making presentations about various aspects of becoming a vendor to the broader marketplace.

OnoPops LLC will be a presenter, discussing food safety.

The company buys and uses raw fruit from all over the state for its ice pops and is, overall, 95 percent locally sourced, he said. The other

5 percent of some of the ice pops, depending on the flavor, may contain sweetened condensed milk or organic mochi flour, neither of which is available locally.

“Most flavors are 100 percent local organic, whenever possible,” said Joshua Lanthier-Welch, chef-owner of OnoPops. Dairy is from Hawaii island, sugar is from Maui, “everything grew in Hawaiian soil and we paid the farmer direct. We are absolutely about sustainable,” he said.

Lanthier-Welch established OnoPops three years ago with his brother Joe, and the company is beginning to see the numbers grow to beyond breaking even, he said.

OnoPops spent roughly $10,000 all told to attain HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) food safety certification, which is one reason it’s been tapped to make the food safety presentation.

Small-business owners generally have no trouble believing in their products, but getting other people interested enough to try them doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

So SPROUT Hawaii sessions will include a portion on branding and marketing, Gough said. Gough and her colleagues will discuss “how important it is to really consciously decide what is the personality of your brand and your product and the importance of being consistent,” she said. Attendees will be shown “some really excellent branding and packaging,” with explanations as to what makes it excellent.

Whole Foods’ local suppliers are encouraged to offer samplings in the stores, and “we always encourage local suppliers to definitely use social media and really use it to engage with your audience,” she said. Social media “can be scary for people who are not already in that space,” Gough said, “but you don’t have to do it all at once.“

While much of the discussion will involve Whole Foods Market standards for prospective vendors, the SPROUT Hawaii sessions’ purpose is larger than that.

“It’s a hearts-and-minds thing,” said Lanthier-Welch of OnoPops. “It goes beyond the whole profit motive.”

In 1860, when the population of Oahu was about 90,000 people, “it was 80 to 90 percent food-sufficient,” he said, as crops grown on-island included rice, corn, and wheat. “We milled our own flour for bread, grew our own soy for shoyu.”

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Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.