Richard Vignola has one of those jobs you never knew existed, but would love to have.
“We’ve been at this for 32 years now, and it’s still pretty sweet,” says the B.C. entrepreneur.
“We get to shake hands with the people who buy our products and we get to shake hands with the people who grow them. So we make this human link. That’s what we do and why we travel the world.”
Vignola, wife Sue and children Simon and Natalia operate Rancho Vignola, which sells $3.5 million worth of fresh nuts and dried fruit to buying groups.
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Their business is seasonal. Orders, the minimum is $500, start going out in November, and when the shipping season concludes a few months later, the warehouse in Armstrong shuts down and the Vignolas hit the road.
They have visited almost all of the 60 farms they buy from, and scouted hundreds more. There’s an organic cranberry supplier in Quebec and a B.C. hazelnut operation, but many are abroad in California, Bali, Australia and Vietnam.
Last winter, Vignola even went to the Amazon rainforest to watch Peruvian farmers harvest Brazil nuts.
Accounts of many of these trips can be found at www.ranchovignola.com.
However, most of the farms he visits are regular family operations. Well, not quite. Vignola contracts only from farms he considers special, and they must score high on two counts.
“The quality of the product comes first, but then it’s the people and their story,” he says.
“By telling these stories, our food becomes very different and is no longer a commodity. The food and the story of the food go together.”
For example, there’s dried cranberries from Quebec’s Fruit d’Or in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes.
The story here is of two farmers and their partners who, instead of pressing the juice from cranberries and using sugar solutions to sweeten them, created an “infusing vat” and use organic apple juice as a sweetener.
Stories like these make for a powerful marketing strategy.
“I think this is the future of food marketing,” says Vignola.
“We see that with our customers. They’re very loyal and won’t buy almonds at a big chain store because they’re cheaper. They buy them from us because they know where they are grown and they feel a connection, through us, to the grower.”
This theme has driven the local food movement, but a slick website or a tweet about fresh-picked veggies won’t make a story powerful, says Vignola. There has to be a lot more than marketing wiles at work.
Vignola says the farmers he buys from are driven. Some dedicate themselves to turn the commodity they produce into a value-added product.
“For example, I’ve found California farmers have a much better idea of value-added,” he says. “So you find almond growers who are doing further processing, such as chocolate-coated or flavour-roasted.”
For others, it’s a quest to create healthier soil or find varieties or production methods that best suit their locale and growing conditions. Vignola says his organic producers have a sense of mission.
In fact, he says, that’s the common thread linking the most innovative farmers he’s met on his worldwide travels.
“A good farmer is always a passionate farmer,” he says.
“That passion is central, it is No. 1. It’s what drives that person, the thing that motivates them every day. It makes them want to be better, to find a way to improve, and it makes them constantly ask themselves, ‘how can I do this better?’ ”
That may sound romantic, almost old-fashioned. But it’s not.
Look at those farmers who excel at something, whether it’s selling direct from the farm, precision agriculture or achieving the highest margins, and you’ll find someone who is relentless about doing better.
There’s no item labelled “passion” on the balance sheet, but it’s the most valuable asset on some farms.
