Clean impact:
Underwritten by:
The Road to Natural 2019
story and images by Rick polito
There are layers to these connections. One is the biodiversity the couple brought to their acres when they discovered it by driving country roads and peeking over fences. One of the first things they did was dig a trench to install an impromptu riparian habitat that brings in different bugs, different plants and different creatures that work together to make the land heathier.
Cultivating clean
Walking the rows of organic herbs on his Barefoot Botanicals farm, tucked behind a “pet resort” the Pennsylvania countryside north of Philadelphia, Eric Vander Hyde can’t help but stop every few feet to pick at a leaf or stalk to share the taste and texture in each variety. The “toothache plant,” spilanthes acmella, leaves a tingly numbness on the tongue. The African basil presents a sweet candy-like take on the classic culinary herb. Fresh ginger, plucked from the ground and rinsed with a hose, has a delicate taste, a subtle shade of the more familiar, dried incarnation.
Enraptured, even enthralled by what he has grown, Vander Hyde’s eagerness and enthusiasm are as abundant as the colangia and turmeric in the greenhouse behind the classroom where his wife Linda Shanahan teaches classes in herbalism and extraction room where the herbs are turned into fragrant hydrosols for aromatherapy.
“As long as we can have good ecology, the plants that we're growing are going to be that much more enriched and vibrant, with less outside inputs. Our community is the same thing.”
Eric Vander Hyde, Barefoot Botanicals
But as on-his-sleeve as the evangelism he feels for what he and his wife have cultivated, Vander Hyde is equally effusive about the connections that toil has in turn cultivated in the community. “It goes back to treating your soil right, treating your community or your ecology right,” Vander Hyde says. “As long as we can have good ecology, the plants that we're growing are going to be that much more enriched and vibrant, with less outside inputs. Our community is the same thing.”
They are growing clean ingredients, but they are also growing roots that connect them to a small constellation of brands like Herbalist and Alchemist that use the herbs raised in the patch of Pennsylvania farmland Vander Hyde and Shanahan lease. Vander Hyde has recently reached out to bartenders who are learning to use the organic herbs to finish off cocktails in high-end nightclubs. He notes with a smile that the effort has taken Barefoot Botanicals from a farm-to-table model to something more like “farm to bar.” Other farmers, some of them growing conventionally with chemicals and pesticides, are also seeing what Barefoot Botanicals has done. Community events bring local residents onto the grounds to walk the rows and taste the herbs Vander Hyde so exuberantly shares. “They can see where the plants are grown. They can touch and taste and smell and have that connection to the land.”
For her, clean transactions are an integral part of the clean ingredient theme we are exploring in Road to Natural 5. “All of those transactions have been kind of purified in that they're more direct. So, that's one way I can think of ‘clean’ that's different than consumers health or the health of the ingredient,” Tsucalas says.
Keeping her business and her ingredients clean mean she’s never tried to separate the values in the product from the values of the brand. “I started this business, not just because I loved granola and love selling granola, I wanted to do something that I felt had a positive difference.” Now, growth of the brand has allowed that positive difference to achieve a wider reach. Among the projects Tsucalas has made part of her clean-ingredient/clean-transaction model is a Give 1 For Food program. The company gives 1 percent of all revenue to support local food programs in the community. A professional fundraiser before turning to granola, she’s using her unique combination of skills to convince other companies to do the same. Clean transactions aren’t limited to the business of making and selling granola. They take place in the community too.
“I wanted to build an organization that could show the power of what business could do in the communities that they live and work in and then beyond,” Tsucalas says. “We're now distributed nationally, and our giving focus has gone from just the Mid Atlantic to nationwide.”
Three different stereos playing three different kinds of music manage to mingle above the tinny clatter of scoops and trays on the production floor at Michele’s Granola. The intermingled soundtrack coexists without annoyance or aggravation, at once both stimulating and surprisingly soothing to the ear.
It never approaches what one would call “harmony,” but the soundwaves resonating across the high-ceilinged room coexist without argument. The teams of scoopers, bakers and bag fillers have settled into their spaces with the music they want to hear.
Michele Tsucalas might call that a “clean transaction,” an arrangement or exchange made with respect in a conscious manner.
She uses the “clean transaction” term a lot. It describes a lot of what she has tried to build in Michele’s Granola, a clean-ingredient granola with a satisfying crunch that’s selling nationwide on Whole Foods Market shelves. “Clean transactions” means she knows her growers and they can share in the success of the brand. It means the offices and production, a dozen or so miles from the Baltimore Convention Center and Expo East, are powered by wind energy. It means her employees are paid fairly and get the benefits they deserve. It means several were recruited from a local program for people with developmental disabilities.
“I wanted to build an organization that could show the power of what business could do in the communities that they live and work in and then beyond,” Tsuscalas
clean transactions
The “positive differences” matters in how the product is made – with local and organic ingredients whenever possible. It matters in employing more people instead of buying more machines. It matters in keeping the big decisions simple – do it right, do it clean.
After all, she says, “this business was just built bag after bag.”
And clean transaction after clean transaction.
Compromise never made it into the recipe.
Walmart distribution for an organic dressing brand? Disruption in the moribund refrigerated dressing category? It’s the stuff of envy for many of the brands we’ll see on the Expo floor two days after our visit.
The authenticity equation has been integral to no small part of that success, Vetter says. Tessemae’s went directly from filling bottles in a restaurant kitchen afterhours to owning a production facility, one that 10 years later is humming with an impressive array of high-cost processing equipment. Vetter figured out almost immediately that co-packers meant compromise and compromise was not an ingredient he wanted added into the family-favorite dressing recipe concocted by his mother, the company’s namesake.
“We said, ‘Well, if we're going to make this special, and we're going to do something special, we need to get a manufacturing facility.” He didn’t need to just own a building. He needed to own the manufacturing.
Based on that decision and all the decisions that came later, Tessemae’s now has the volume and velocity to help other brands do it right, to be successful, to avoid the compromises that all too often, Vetter says, doom brands large and small.
“It goes back to the intentions of the whole thing,” he says. “If the intentions are right, you will get to a critical mass. You will get to a point where you will continue to make the right decisions instead of the wrong ones.”
Clean intentions
Splashed in multiple shades of paint, all of the them bright and even loud, the walls on the headquarters of Tessemae’s Pantry, our last stop and a 20-minute drive from Expo East, are covered in Sharpie-scrawled quotes. Most are inspiring, a few are just silly. Some dip into the profane. But all of them are authentic, clearly not the work of an interior designer or really anybody setting out to create an image or effect.
The wildly successful organic salad dressing brand’s founder, Greg Vetter, himself both occasionally silly and occasionally not afraid to be profane is equally and obviously authentic as well, about as authentic as it gets in business, especially at the level of success Vetter has driven Tessemae’s in just 10 years.
Read more about the power of clean ingredients
Underwritten by:
The Road to Natural 2019
There is also the benefit of creating jobs and not just keeping local money in local pockets, but bringing money from far beyond Doylestown to help build a clean-ingredient focused economy. Whether he sells a bouquet of flowers at the farmers market or sunflower seed oil to a personal care company in California, the money helps grow something close to home. “I'm going to take that money and I'm going to go to the local co-op. The local co-op is going to buy stuff from another grower. That grower is going to buy their seeds from the guy down in the next town who's growing tomato seeds,” Vander Hyde says. “That's the way we impact our community.
Such connections and “ripple effects” are as much the bounty of Barefoot Botanicals as anything Vander Hyde has plucked from a stalk as he shows us his farm.
And all of it—the plants, the people and the product—sprouted right from the ground at his feet.
“I started this business, not just because I loved granola and love selling granola, I wanted to do something that I felt had a positive difference.” Michele Tsucalas, Michele’s Granola
How clean ingredient companies change more than their products
Now Vetter can wield the critical mass of Tessemae’s to springboard other authentic brands get off the ground. He tells the story of a Baltimore chef who wanted to make a hot sauce based on the all-but-extinct fish pepper, a strain no farmer was willing to cultivate at startup volume. Vetter’s company has the volume. A farmer was convinced to revive the fish pepper for Tessemae’s buffalo ranch dressing. But it’s also in that chef’s new Snake Oil hot sauce brand.
“It is a volume game,” Vetter says. “You’ve got to be able to call somebody and say, ‘Hey, man, we need fish peppers. I need you to allocate a portion of your farm to grow a pepper you never heard of heard about before.”
There are many things the clean ingredient movement can do that have impact. Tessemae’s has a foundation that establishes farmers markets in food deserts, for instance. But the real results, Vetter believes, are in building a better food system, helping brands like Snake Oil get to that right-intentions “critical mass” he talks about. That Tessemae’s is successful means the growers it sources from can be successful. It means other service providers and suppliers who do business the right way have a right to share in that success.
Clean ingredients are important for health, Vetter says. But they’re also important to build a healthier food culture and a healthier business culture to go with.
One based on what Tsucala described as “clean transaction.”
One based on what Vetter might describe as staying authentic, authentic enough that it could be quoted on a wall right outside his office.
“If the intentions are right, you will get to a critical mass. You will get to a point where you will continue to make the right decisions instead of the wrong ones.”
Greg Vetter, Tessemae’s Pantry