You hear those stories from Japan about shoppers scanning a barcode to find out what farm their vegetables or fruits were grown on and think, ‘How odd.’
It’s hard to imagine something like that in North America but, in fact, it is happening here and in a food category you might not expect—wheat flour.
Stone-Buhr Flour Company, a regional flour producer in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, launched www.findthefarmer.com last year. Go to the website, punch in the best-before date on a bag of its all-purpose flour and you can find out who grew the wheat that flour was made from. There are pictures, little stories about them and their families, and even a place where you can send them a message.
Sounds like a gimmick, right? Well kinda, concedes Stone-Buhr owner Josh Dorf.
“Let’s face it, it’s hard to market wheat flour,” says Dorf. “I was looking for a way to distinguish Stone-Buhr from the Robin Hoods of the world. We have this direct connection to the farmers who supply the wheat and I thought it would be a good idea to showcase that connection.”
Dorf made his money in Silicon Valley and bought Stone-Buhr (a century-old regional company that had been swallowed up by the huge multinational Unilever) because “after witnessing firsthand the rise and fall of the dot-com bubble, I craved a return to a simpler, better way of doing business—where real products are traded with real people.”
Among those real people are the 33 wheat growers who make up Shepherd’s Grain (www.shepherdsgrain.com), a group dedicated to both sustainable farming practices and ensuring their members actually make money. Dorf shares those values and pays the Shepherd’s Grain farmers according to a formula that not only covers their cost of production but, over the long term, also ensures a profit.
“I like knowing that the farmers make a profit on the wheat that goes into our flour,” says the 40-year-old Californian. “It’s not in all of our products—that’s my hedge, so to speak—but for our all-purpose flour, we have hitched our cart to their horse.”
But Dorf also understands idealism divorced from the bottom line won’t last long. (He made his money as an e-commerce pioneer, largely in software that more efficiently manages inventory from warehouse to sales counter.)
So yes, the Find the Farmer website is a marketing ploy targeted to those people who, as the saying goes, ‘care about where their food comes from.’ More than 20,000 people have visited the website, although most just look around.
“The reality is that very few people buy a package, go and track the flour, and then have a real interaction with farmer,” admits Dorf.
But that’s OK. They learn about the company’s principles and hopefully tell their friends. This kind of consumer-producer connection helps in other ways too, such as when it was discovered earlier this year some Chinese flour-makers were using crushed limestone as a bleaching agent in flour. That worried some consumers, but not customers of San Francisco-based Stone-Buhr.
So OK, maybe the Japanese aren’t so odd after all and being able to link food to the farm that grew it can be useful. But there’s another aspect to this story.
When Dorf first proposed the program, there was resistance from both the farmers and the mill that grinds flour for Stone-Buhr. They wanted to “dummy it down” by just saying what region the flour come from, rather than getting so specific with farmer pictures, bios and all that sort of stuff.
But Dorf insisted, pointing out that they already had full traceability in their system (the mill because of food safety requirements and the farmers because they pay a certifying body called the Food Alliance to document their farming practices are “environmentally and socially responsible”).
“The data was just sitting there, so why not use it?” asks Dorf.
Why not, indeed? Traceability is increasingly being embedded in the basic fabric of farming but why think of it just in terms of food safety? Actually, many farmers see it as just a burden and an expense, and certainly have no interest in extending it further by throwing up their pictures and personal info on the Internet for all to see.
Josh Dorf came at it from a different angle, as a guy who made money by connecting the retail world with all the back-end stuff that takes place in warehouses and production facilities.
“I’ve done much, much more complicated things,” he notes. “To me, this was just a no-brainer.”
Dorf won’t be the last person to think that. You can dismiss this sort of thing and think, ‘Why bother?’ Or you can say, ‘If it’s not that expensive or complicated, why not?’
(Glenn Cheater is editor of the Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found in the News Desk section at www.farmcentre.com)
