Purchasing: Local Interest

Operators are eager to oblige consumers’ call for local food sourcing, but doing so can require adjustments in purchasing strategies.

By Kate Leahy, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 3/15/2008

Davina Kwong Yu (r.) and fellow Bon Appétit Management Co. chefs visited an organic farm in Lexington Park, Md. Bucknell University sources fruit and vegetables from local growers when possible. Locally sourced pork is on the menu at Chicago’s Uncommon Ground restaurants.

Every week during football season, Dartmouth’s football coach orders apples for the team. When an excellent local crop became available, David Newlove, associate director of dining services for the Hanover, N.H., college, switched the team’s delivery from conventional apples to the local variety.

Almost immediately, the coach had Newlove on the phone, requesting a different case of apples. "[Local apples] are smaller and they tend to have blemishes—they don’t look like apples from the grocery store," Newlove says.

He persuaded the coach to give the apples a try. Now the team is hooked on the local crop and doesn’t want any other kind. But therein lies a new problem: The apples are available only two months out of the year.

The situation likely is familiar to any foodservice operator who has tried to source local and organic products. Legwork is required to secure the supply, and customer education is needed to persuade diners to try the product. Then the supply dwindles.

Still, for many operators, the extra work defines who they are. At Dartmouth, this means increasing purchases of local and organic foods by at least 2% each year out of an annual budget of $5 million.

Local or Organic?

Helen and Michael Cameron, co-owners of two-unit Uncommon Ground in Chicago, look first for local foods and second for organic foods from farther afield.

"We’ve decided that supporting our local economy is one of the biggest things that we want to do," says Helen Cameron. "You’re supporting the local economy. You’re supporting the local farms. The local farmers we work with operate in a sustainable and/or organic manner."

Such a preference reflects an industry-wide splintering of support for the broad term "organic." Terms such as "locavore" (local-food eater) and "100-mile radius," both of which indicate a preference for locally grown produce, are used with more frequency. Meanwhile, some family farms have rebranded themselves as being "biodynamic" or "eco-ganic" instead of "organic" to distinguish themselves from farms that have gone through the federal organic certification process, which can be a cumbersome and expensive effort.

"For me, local comes first," asserts Davina Kwong Yu, general manager for contractor Bon Appétit Management Co. at Oracle Corp.’s Reston, Va., corporate campus. "There are definitely times when I have clients who ask for organics and prefer organics. But when I source and when I buy, I look to local [producers] first."

In R&I’s 2005 Organic Food Study, 50% of operators surveyed said that they purchased organics, with 29.3% indicating that they did so because product quality is better. The menus of those who purchased organics, however, were on average less than 10% organic.

Yet sales of organic goods remain strong. In 2006, the Organic Trade Association reported that U.S. organic food sales totaled nearly $17 billion, up 54% from 2003. Some restaurants have taken considerable pains to put organic first.

A handful of restaurants—such as Tilth in Seattle and Crust in Chicago—have been certified organic by accredited third-party groups. Local crops must meet organic standards in order for these restaurants to be able to purchase them.

"Organics fulfill a need for people who choose to eat organically," says John Cummins, general manager of resident dining at Bucknell University, a Parkhurst Dining Services account. Even so, local takes precedence on the Lewisburg, Pa., campus. "Most local farmers we do business with are not organic," Cummins says.

For operators who call themselves green, it’s clear that ingredient sourcing matters. In R&I’s Tastes of America Study conducted last year, 75.2% of consumers said they agree that a restaurant that considers itself eco-friendly should purchase and serve organically grown or organically raised foods.

Getting Started

When Uncommon Ground’s Helen Cameron began buying from local farmers more than 10 years ago, she would go to Chicago’s Greenmarket and buy what she could afford that day with cash. Although her produce needs today are much more extensive, those early days allowed her to build a network among regional farmers.

Such a network can be more difficult to cultivate within larger corporations.

"It’s very time-consuming," says Kwong Yu, who seeks out new farmer suppliers at the beginning of each summer to provide local foodstuffs for her operation, which serves 700 people daily. The hardest part, she explains, is earning farmers’ trust. "When I’ve gone to talk with them, they say they’re not interested," she says. "Some farmers feel that it’s not worth their time selling wholesale."

To bridge that gap, Kwong Yu frequents local markets and buys produce with cash. "It lets the farmers know that we’re here, that we’re not going away," she explains. Once the farmers get to know her, she approaches them again about becoming approved Bon Appétit vendors and then proceeds to help them with the required paperwork.

At Bucknell University, the biggest challenge for Cummins and Resident District Manager David Freeland was finding local farmers who could meet Parkhurst Dining’s $2 million liability-insurance requirement. A local business organization helped farmer members of the Susquehanna Valley Growers Association pool their resources so that, in aggregate, they could cover the insurance requirement and become eligible vendors.

"It put us in a position where we could do an inspection of the growers and then we could lump them together financially," Cummins says. "We could order food from a number of different people and write one check."

To take care of some of the distribution challenges, Cummins and Freeland have encouraged their suppliers to choose local producers as often as possible; to facilitate relationships between the two groups, they have hosted a dinner that brings together suppliers and local producers. The cost of buying local, Freeland notes, is comparable. "When produce is in season, it’s less expensive," he says.

Selling Local and Organic

Once an operator commits to buying local or organic products, the next step, as Newlove discovered with the Dartmouth football team, is advertising the change to the customer. Signage matters. Kwong Yu also recalls a time when she forgot to place a card in the cafe noting that the apples were local.

"Clients were wondering why the apples looked so different," she says, adding that in those situations, it helps to have a staff comfortable with explaining where the produce comes from.

At Bucknell University, aesthetically challenging local or organic produce is most successful when cooked in a stew or chili. "When it’s been diced and cooked, when the aesthetic is less relevant, we’ve had good experiences," says Cummins.

Another piece of the buy-local puzzle is seasonality, and this, too, requires consumer education. Consumers demand certain produce items year-round. Although Newlove has had luck phasing out out-of-season strawberries, he found that he can’t abandon tomatoes in the off-season.

"Two or three years ago, for a week we didn’t have tomatoes," he recalls. "I had parents calling me."

But when local tomatoes enter the market, there’s plenty of opportunity to make a positive impact on clients. Last summer, Kwong Yu took a few baskets from the cafe out to the farm to collect yellow sunburst tomatoes. "That’s when a lot of customers were able to truly understand that, wow, [food] doesn’t have to come off of the same big truck."

ONLINE RESOURCES

Finding local suppliers takes legwork. Fortunately, a growing number of regional and national resources offer starting points.

NATIONAL SOURCES

• www.chefscollaborative.org: A professional network of chefs and food purveyors focused on fostering sustainable foodways.
• www.farmerchefconnection.org: Affiliated with Ecotrust, Farmer-Chef Connection provides networking opportunities for food buyers and local farmers.
• www.localharvest.org: A national directory of family farms and farmers’ markets.

REGIONAL SOURCES

• www.caff.org: California’s Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) Web site has listings of local chapters. The University of California at Santa Cruz buys local produce through the help of a local CAFF chapter.
• www.farmfresh.org: This local guide for Rhode Island connects Rhode Island chefs to local farmers and keeps track of what’s in season.
• www.farmtochefexpress.org: Started with the help of a New York State grant, Farm to Chef connects New York City chefs with New York farmers by facilitating ordering and organizing farm visits.
• www.freshfarmmarkets.org: Primarily geared toward promoting Washington, D.C.’s farmers markets, Freshfarm Markets also connects chefs with local farmers.
• www.familyfarmed.org: A project of national nonprofit organization Sustain, the site helps commercial buyers and the public find Midwestern organic and sustainable farms. FamilyFarmed.org also hosts an annual expo at which Chicago-area chefs pair with local farmers for an open-to-the-public dinner.
• www.cascadeharvest.org: The Cascade Harvest Coalition’s Farm-to-Table program aims to develop connections between Western Washington farmers and foodservice buyers at farmer-buyer workshops held throughout the state.