Treating perfectly edible carrots as garbage just because they have a broken tip or other cosmetic imperfection drives vegetable growers crazy.
So three Manitoba farmers decided to do something about it.
They researched and developed soup recipes that would use imperfect vegetables and worked with an entrepreneur to figure out how to get high-grade soup into tetrapacks, the brick-shaped packages common in drink products. They also found out how to build a tetrapack factory in Portage La Prairie, Man., where they farm.
“This is a venture we need if we’re going to stay in agriculture,” said Dave Jeffries.
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“I don’t believe we can just survive on producing the raw product.”
Now, 80 stores in Winnipeg and hundreds across Western Canada sell their four soup flavours in a trial that the growers hope will lead to a regular place on store shelves. Right now the soups are located at the ends of the aisles, where new products are featured.
They are marketed with the Peak of the Market logo, an image usually associated with bags of fresh, unprocessed vegetables in the produce department.
Larry McIntosh, chief executive officer of the 50-member Peak of the Market farmer co-operative, said moving up the processed food chain is its best bet to expand the Manitoba produce industry, which already exports a lot to other provinces and the United States.
“We’re not looking to get out of the fresh market, but by going into soups we’re looking at increasing production,” McIntosh said.
“We’re still looking to sell lots and lots and lots of carrots in the fresh market, but if we need more acreage we’ll grow more acreage for the soups.”
Jeffries said the soup contract will be a big boost for the tetrapack factory in Portage, called Great Plains Aseptic Processors, which is big enough to do commercial runs of products but still small enough to do test runs as part of its research and development program.
The soup project would probably not have gone ahead if the three carrot growers had not known the tetrapack plant was being developed and the plant would probably not have been built if the growers hadn’t committed to making their soup.
“It wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have the hope that there was something being set up there,” Jeffries said.
Funding from the Manitoba government’s Agri-Food Research and Development Initiative helped with product development, but Jeffries said the commercial runs will not rely on government support.
“We’re businesspeople and we’re firm believers that if it can’t stand on its own it shouldn’t happen,” he said.
Jeffries and his partners have spent $50,000 on package development. They also pay grocery stores shelving fees for carrying their product.
“It’s cost a lot more than we thought it would,” he said.
A $300,000 run of soup is about to be produced and “you can’t do that on a shoestring.”
Jeffries estimated the soup project has cost less than $1 million, but “it’s the kind of thing that if you went back to the beginning and knew what it would cost, you might think twice. But we’d probably still have done it.”
The soup isn’t cheap, at about $3 per litre, which is part of the marketing strategy, McIntosh said.
Peak of the Market is aware that it risks stepping on the toes of industry juggernaut Campbell’s and isn’t trying to go head to head with that company’s products.
“We’re looking at a gourmet soup, a premium soup, and not to be a me-too,” he said.
“Campbell’s is certainly a huge company and they have a lot of quality products, as do Knorr and some of the other big companies.”
Peak is trying to differentiate its products by making them more spicy and chunky than most blended soups. Because it has to be contained in tetrapacks and poured out of a tiny opening, the consistency can’t be like Campbell’s Chunky soup line, but the developers have attempted to make it less uniformly liquid than the general Campbell’s line.
Jeffries hopes it is able to find a consumer looking for a new type of soup without picking a fight with the industry’s giants.
“We’re trying not to upset them.”
