One of my favorite local products comes out of San Diego, California from a deli called “Good On Ya.” The founder, Kristen Fillat, started Good On Ya after an 11-year stint on the United States National Field Hockey Team. As a former Olympic athlete, eating healthfully was a critical part of Kristen’s life and she wanted to share healthy, natural food with others. She opened her first deli in 2001 and eventually expanded to three locations. Kristen and her team noticed that their customers were looking for a healthful take-away breakfast option, so they started carrying a variety of nutrition bars. But after finding themselves a little nonplussed with the available options and nutritional content, they decided to create their own organic breakfast bar.

Kristen and her team created a delicious product that follows a simple but profound motto: “Every Ingredient Matters.” This means that each ingredient included in their USDA certified organic bars serves a nutritional purpose. There are no fillers. It’s a protein bar, a fiber bar, a snack bar, an energy bar, a nutrition bar. It’s food!

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Whole Foods Market Local Forager Denise Breyley travels around the beautiful Pacific Northwest meeting the amazing farmers, ranchers and producers who supply our tables with fresh, locally grown food.

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, our growing season can feel pretty brief. With the rain, wind and short, dark days, we’re used to saying goodbye fresh veggies in the late fall and early spring.

But we’re working to make that growing season a bit longer for one of our latest Local Producer Loan recipients, Willie Greens Organic Farm. Based in Monroe, Washington, Willie Greens has been growing a wide variety of organically certified vegetables since 1987. The owner, Jeff Miller, is a former chef committed to providing customers with only the freshest, organic and seasonally grown produce available.

With his loan, Jeff was able to construct greenhouses on his farm to extend the growing season later into the winter and allow him to get started earlier in the spring. Each greenhouse is 30 feet by 240 feet, or 7200 square feet. Construction began in October of 2011 and will culminate with five new greenhouses for a variety of produce.

I met Jeff through my work as the Local Forager for the Pacific Northwest region. In this role, I travel through Oregon, Washington and British Columbia to meet the amazing farmers, ranchers and producers who supply our tables with fresh, locally grown food and see how I can bring their products to customers in our stores. You can read more about producers like Jeff and Willie Greens on my blog, The Local Forager.

And if you live in Washington or Oregon you can buy Willie Greens’ produce at Whole Foods Market stores in your state – even when the weather outside isn’t great for growing.

Working on the Local Producer Loan Program gives me tons of opportunities to hear about local food systems across the country. Last month, I had the privilege of working with MOOMilk, an Augusta, Maine vendor that supplies organic milk to our stores in Maine.  MOOMilk is made up of 10 organic dairy farms along with the Maine Farm Bureau and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. These groups joined together because they are passionate, not just about producing quality organic milk, but also about supporting local family-run farms and maintaining the culture of the dairy industry in Central Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In their business model, the farms that make up MOOMilk are part owners of the company and 90% of the profits are returned directly to the dairies.
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In the infamous words of Julia Child, “With enough butter, anything is good!” And that couldn’t be more true when it comes to our most recent Local Producer Loan recipient, Epicurean Butter. Their compound butter is designed to make you feel like a Julia Child in your own kitchen. Compound butter, also known as “finishing butter,” is unsalted and blended with a variety of seasonings. It‘s generally used to top meat, fish and vegetables or to finish a sauce. Epicurean’s flavor-infused compound butters (both sweet and savory) allow you to bring a restaurant quality preparation to your table.

Is your steak feeling a little lonely? Give it a dab of Black Truffle Butter. Does your scone need a pick me up? Some Orange Honey Butter should do the trick. And if your baguette seems a bit boring, Epicurean’s award-winning Roasted Garlic Herb Butter will surely give it some sass. Their products combine grade AA butter with all natural flavors, producing a high quality, unique product that makes cooking a joy for the novice and advanced chef alike.

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Every product has a story, and Brad’s Raw Chips is a classic tale of success! Over four years ago, founder and creator, Brad Gruno discovered the health benefits of eating raw. He lost over 40 pounds and enjoyed a level of energy he hadn’t experienced in many years. Despite the advantages of a raw diet, one thing he really missed was the crunch of a good snack. So Brad began making raw chips in his kitchen to satisfy that craving and, as it turns out, his friends really liked them too! A business was born and Brad starting selling his chips at farmer’s markets. Eventually, he approached his local Whole Foods Market with his product and started selling his snacks in a few stores. Apparently, our customers like a raw snack product with a good crunch too, because now the chips are selling in most of our stores on the East Coast. They are growing so fast that they need to move into a larger facility and are using the proceeds from their Local Producer Loan from Whole Foods Market to purchase equipment for their new home!

You can get your crunch on with 14 different varieties of Brad’s Raw Chips, including classic kale chips, sun dried tomato crackers, and sweet potato chips. All the chips and crackers are dehydrated below 115 degrees so they still get a fantastic crunch while preserving the foods’ nutrients and enzymes. Brad’s Raw Chips are available in most Whole Foods Market stores along the Eastern Seaboard.

Our local producers are total rock stars. Their creativity, ingenuity and absolutely delightful products are a constant source of inspiration for us. Judging by sales, we know they are a favorite of yours, too! Helping them do more became a goal for Whole Foods Market a few years ago and as of this month, we’ve funded more than $5 million in low-interest loans through our Local Producer Loan Program to help them grow their businesses.

To celebrate the $5 million mark, we’re giving away a basket filled with culinary treasures from several of our loan recipients! This is your chance to experience some of the fabulous products made by passionate small producers that aren’t available in your neck of the woods. Just post a comment below by October 21 telling us what your favorite local product is and why, and you’ll have a chance to win! We’ll choose one lucky commenter at random to receive the basket.

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Americans love their popcorn! I can’t remember watching a movie without it. Popcorn balls at Halloween and flavored popcorn at Christmas are fond memories too. I never knew there was much difference from one kernel to the next, but there is! Our most recent Local Producer Loan recipient, Tiny But Mighty, taught me that not all kernels are created equal.

The popcorn (or maize) from Tiny But Mighty is native to North America and can claim the “heirloom” title because the genetic make-up of their product is virtually identical to the corn that covered this part of the world for thousands of years. In the 1850s, Native Americans shared this unique corn with a pioneer family who enjoyed it for generations. However, by the 1970s it was all but forgotten until a family member discovered the last remaining popcorn in a fruit jar. He planted a handful of kernels and popped the rest!

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The goal of the Local Producer Loan Program is to find and support unique, local products. We’ve definitely hit the mark on “unique” with Soy-Sen-Zay Edamame Dips. I love edamame as an appetizer at a sushi bar, or in a salad, but I’m quite sure I’ve never eaten edamame in a dip….until now!

Our most recent Local Producer Loan recipient, family owned and operated Soy-Sen-Zay, is the world’s first company to create and sell all-natural Edamame dips. All the dips are made by hand in small batches every week. The dips have a creamy texture, deliver a wonderful flavor and pack a nutritional punch. Not to mention they are vegan and contain no artificial preservatives!

Soy-Sen-Zay Edamame Dip comes in six flavors: Original, Cucumber, Garlic, Spicy Asian Pepper, Ginger Wasabi and Spicy Garlic. At this time, Soy-Sen-Zay’s product are available in our Colorado and Kansas City stores. However, with the proceeds from their Local Producer Loan from Whole Foods Market, they are purchasing equipment that will allow them to produce more product and grow into other areas of the country. We can’t wait!

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What I really love about working on the Local Producer Loan Program is that we are helping people with a passion for what they do to grow their business. By providing a low interest loan, we make capital available to them to expand their operations and bring fantastic local products to our shoppers. This month we’ve taken it one step further by providing a loan to a social enterprise — an organization that uses business principles to solve a pressing social problem.

Our newest Local Producer Loan recipient, Thistle Farms, is the non-profit business run by the women of Magdalene, a residential recovery program for women who have survived violence, prostitution and addiction. Here’s how they describe what they do:

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Thanks to Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, co-founders of Back to the Roots, a 100% sustainable urban mushroom farm, for sharing their story. Read on to learn how this Whole Foods Market Local Producer Loan Recipient has launched a Facebook campaign to share the gift of growing with kids across the country.

During our last semester at UC Berkeley we heard an interesting fact in a class: gourmet mushrooms could potentially be grown on 100% recycled coffee grounds. Excited about the waste-to-food model, we started experimenting in a fraternity kitchen, eventually planting ten test buckets of coffee grounds mixed with mushroom spawn (seed). Out of the ten, only one grew — but we saw a huge potential in that one bucket!

Not knowing what a good mushroom tasted like vs. a bad one, we walked that paint bucket of mushrooms down to the best restaurant in town — Chez Panisse — whose founder, Alice Waters, happened to be there. Cal, one of the head chefs, tried some of the mushrooms on the spot. We still remember him sautéing the mushrooms and shouting, “Whoa, these are delicious!” That same day, even more excited, we walked that bucket over to our local Whole Foods Market store in Berkeley and talked to the first guy we saw in the produce department, someone packing the vegetables. Before we knew it, we were being passed around the whole store telling a lot of the team members about the sustainable mushrooms we were trying to grow! A few weeks later, we received an email from Randy Ducummon, the regional produce coordinator for Whole Foods Market’s Northern California Region, and he was really supportive about the possibility of a local, sustainable, urban mushroom farm. “If you figure this out, we’ll launch them in stores.”  We’ll never forget those words!

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