You hear those stories from Japan about shoppers scanning a bar code to find out what farm their produce was grown on and think, “how odd.”
It may be hard to imagine something like that in North America, but 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.
Consumers can enter the best-before date from a bag of the company’s all-purpose flour and find out who grew the wheat from which the flour was made.
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There are pictures and stories about the farmers and their families, and a place where consumers can send them a message.
Sounds like a gimmick, right? Well kind of, conceded Stone-Buhr owner Josh Dorf.
“Let’s face it, it’s hard to market wheat flour,” Dorf said.
“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 because he yearned to be in a 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), which is dedicated to sustainable farming practices and ensuring their members make money.
Dorf shares those values and pays the Shepherd’s Grain farmers using a formula that not only covers their cost of production but, over the long term, also ensures a profit.
However, the 40-year-old Californian also understands that 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 the sales counter.
So yes, the Find the Farmer website is a marketing ploy targeted to 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,” Dorf said.
But that’s OK, he added. They learn about the company’s principles and hopefully tell their friends. It also helps when there’s a food scare, such as when it was discovered earlier this year that Chinese flour makers were using crushed limestone as a bleaching agent in flour.
So OK, maybe the Japanese aren’t so odd after all. But there’s another aspect to this story.
Initially, there was resistance from the farmers and the mill that grinds flour for Stone-Buhr. They wanted to “dummy it down” simply identifying the region the flour came from, rather than getting specific with farmer pictures and bios. But Dorf insisted, pointing out that they already had full traceability in their system.
“The data was just sitting there, so why not use it?” he said.
Why not, indeed? Traceability is increasingly being embedded in the fabric of farming, but why think of it just in terms of food safety?
Many farmers see it as a burden and an expense, and certainly have no interest in extending it further by putting their pictures and personal information on the internet for all to see.
Dorf came at it from a different angle, as a guy who made money by connecting the retail world with the back-end stuff that takes place in warehouses and production facilities.
“I’ve done much, much more complicated things,” he said. “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.
