Countless Canadian farmers are blazing their own trails straight to the consumer through on-farm stores, specialty shops, farmers’ markets and the internet.
The goal, of course, is to wring a decent price from the food they produce. But it’s also about saving the family-sized farm and making consumers aware of how wonderful the food they produce really is.
The road is new to them, but it’s the same one organic farmers headed down 30 years ago.
No longer a hippie dream, Canadian organic retail sales have grown at a sizzling 20 percent annually for a decade and are forecast to top $3 billion in 2005.
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This success didn’t happen by accident and holds a lesson for today’s direct marketers.
Debra Boyle is a pioneer of Canadian organics and, as founder of the country’s leading distributor of organic fresh food, one of its great success stories.
Boyle’s story is a great counterculture saga, one that began in the late 1970s on a three-acre farm on British Columbia’s Gabriola Island, where the Ottawa-born woman picked wild herbs and made her own flavourful goat cheese. When she moved to Vancouver, the young mother volunteered at a co-op and did such a great job of organizing the produce section that she became its first-ever paid produce manager.
“I was paid for four hours a day, but I worked six,” she recalls. “I’d buy the produce, display it and take people around the store, saying, ‘this goes with this and this is good with that.’ I had all these people coming in and if I told people, ‘you got to try this,’ they’d buy it.”
Working for the co-op didn’t give Boyle a fat bank account. So when she decided to strike out on her own in 1981, she borrowed $10,000 from a friend and made deliveries in an old Volvo station wagon.
“I paid the loan back within six months and the first year in business I did $1.2 million in sales,” she says, still sounding a bit wondrous about her fast start.
It was just the start. By 2003, when she sold Pro Organics to natural and organic food distributor SunOpta, it had $35 million in annual sales, 130 employees and state-of-the-art refrigerated distribution centres in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.
Aside from those goats on Gabriola, Boyle has never farmed, but she’s learned a thing or two about farmers, especially their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to marketing and distribution.
“A lot of organic farmers are probably more entrepreneurial than conventional farmers simply because they went against the norm: they had to find their own markets and value add in order to survive,” says Boyle, now a SunOpta vice-president.
The farmers were also a tight-knit group: friends who shared common values, a common cause and who worked closely together on the critical issue of organic certification.
So naturally, organic farmers had already launched consumer-focused, co-operative marketing ventures by the time Boyle and her ramshackle old Volvo appeared on the scene, right?
Hardly. Organic or conventional, we’re talking farmers here.
“Even as early as the 1970s, there was an abundance of organic product,” says Boyle. “So these farmers were used to battling it out in the marketplace amongst one another.”
As a result, Boyle used her considerable selling talents to convince farmers there was a better way.
She persuaded growers to work in groups to brand their products and provide consistent quality and supply. She sold them on the need to upgrade post-harvest handling, such as hydro-coolers, and how her company’s services, such as stripping outer leaves off wilting heads of lettuce, kept grocers and consumers happy and made everyone more money.
“You know there’s a lot of people who say, ‘oh, retailers suck, distributors suck, everyone should go to the farm to buy their food,’ but that’s not practical; it’s just silly,” says Boyle.
“We have added a lot of value by creating a really good distribution service. We really were able to build the marketplace in Canada with all these growers, one at a time.”
There’s still much to do, says Boyle, who isn’t satisfied with a small corner in a big chain’s produce department. She also decries the lowest-price-is-the-law philosophy that drives food retailing.
However, she notes with considerable satisfaction that most of the farmers she dealt with 20 years ago are still in business.
That’s a point that all those direct marketers who are doing it all by themselves – producing, processing, marketing and distributing – might want to remember.
Alliances – with each other and fair-minded marketers and distributors – may be what’s needed if they want to keep going down the road they’ve set out on.
To learn more about Pro Organics, visit www.proorganics.com.
Glenn Cheater is editor of 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. The views stated here are for information only and are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
