Hannah Wallace

The Maker Space Where Members Are More Than Their Pasts

This article on Past Lives in Portland, Oregon appeared in Reasons to be Cheerful on July 23rd. 

 

When Brandon Morlock was released from prison in September of 2020, he wanted to create a business that would improve peoples’ lives. His crime had been a terrible accident four and a half years earlier, when he was just 21: He was in a car crash that killed his friend Ryan. Before the accident, Ryan had been trying to help Morlock build a collective space that was part private tutoring business and part carpentry/engineering incubator. 

Behind bars, Morlock worked in various prison industries. At his first prison, there was a wood shop, a metal shop, an auto shop and a garment factory. At Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, Oregon, he worked at a furniture factory run by Oregon Corrections Enterprises. “I actually acquired valuable skills there,” he says. He also did forestry work — cutting down trees, trapping invasive species and maintaining trails and campgrounds. By the time Morlock got out of prison four years ago — in the middle of the pandemic — his focus had shifted. Wanting to honor Ryan, he set about launching a maker space in Portland.   

Past Lives currently has 200 members across 12 guilds. Courtesy of Past Lives

“Until I went to prison, I did not consider the formerly incarcerated as part of my vision,” says Morlock, who says he’s had a dream of building a collective space since he was a child. “It was after seeing the inside of the prison system and seeing the prison industries that I was inspired to make that a focal point of my business.” On his walk to work at the furniture factory, he’d see people doing metalworking, automotive, textiles and machining. “The sheer amount of talent that exists within prison industries!” he says, sounding awed. He wanted to see that talent properly rewarded. 

Morlock began to deliver on that goal when he opened his collective space, called Past Lives, in 2020. An early supporter of the project was Glenn Dahl, cofounder of local company Dave’s Killer Bread, well-known for being a proud second-chance employer. (Glenn’s brother, Dave, served 15 years in prison.) “Glenn was very interested in our mission,” says Morlock. Dahl offered to guarantee Morlock’s lease, which made conversations with prospective landlords much easier. 

Past Lives is now based in a 26,000-square-foot building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of southeast Portland. Members — there are currently 200 — pay $200 a month for unlimited use of the facilities, which include a wood shop, a metal shop (with blacksmithing, welding fabrication and metal casting), a ceramics studio, a sound studio, a textile studio, a stained glass studio and a dark room. (Members can also pay extra for a private studio.) Membership to Past Lives comes with access to all kinds of high-tech equipment including 3-D printers, a CNC (computer numerical control) lathe, leather-working equipment, a machine embroidery workshop and a jewelry-making area. Members also get a 10 percent discount on classes, which range from Blacksmithing 101 to Intro to Woodworking for Women, Femmes and Thems. About 10 percent of members are people who have been incarcerated. 

Past Lives occupies 26,000-square-foot building in southeast Portland. Courtesy of Past Lives

It’s well known that prison workforce programs help reduce recidivism. A meta-analysis released by the The Mackinac Center for Public Policy in 2023 found that an inmate’s participation in prison workforce or education programs led to a 14.8 percent decrease in the likelihood of recidivism. Though Past Lives doesn’t keep statistics on how many formerly incarcerated members have gone on to find full-time employment, Morlock says that his facilities manager, Nathan Mosley, just got his general contractor license and plans to launch his own firm. Former Past Lives member Casey Simmons is the founder of The Strong Neck, a company that makes a device that helps you strengthen your neck and jaw. “They’re selling really well,” notes Morlock. 

Morlock, who is now 30, comes from a union family — his dad and brother are both members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, Local 196. Inspired partly by that and partly by video games he’s played (like Warcraft II and Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind), he eventually created 12 guilds at Past Lives. “It’s a collective of guilds,” Morlock says. “We have metalworkers, woodworkers, textile makers, tech people — any respected trade. The building is our Guild Hall.” Each guild determines what their own shop layout looks like, what their classes look like and what they do with their budget. 

 

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Walking through Past Lives on a recent weekday, the warehouse was a hive of activity, with people hunched over anvils in the metal shop and sawing pieces of wood in the wood shop. Impressive industrial machines like a red sandblast cabinet and a sewing machine for leather-working stood at the ready. Upstairs, in the community kitchen, people were preparing lunch and hanging out around a communal table. Morlock introduced me to his colleague, 38-year-old Phoebe Valenti, director of design/build at Past Lives Construction, the maker space’s design and construction firm.  

Spend a few minutes with Valenti and you can tell she’s a passionate advocate for giving all marginalized people the opportunity to build skills and grow. “I’m someone who has had some of my own struggles,” she says. “Not with the carceral system but I’m a single mother of two and I had to flee domestic violence and so, I have a lot of simpatico with the experience of what it is to be othered by society.” Her hope is that Past Lives Construction will give people an opportunity to further their careers in the construction trade, which is booming right now. 

Membership to Past Lives comes with access to a wide range of studios and equipment. Courtesy of Past Lives

Currently, she has 15 people on her design/build team, but the number fluctuates day to day, depending on the projects. Over one-third of them are formerly incarcerated. She also works with fantastic sub-contractors, including a plumber and an electrician, who have each spent time in prison. “It’s really cool to understand on such a deep level how much people can not be defined by those things,” she says, referring to past crimes.

Right now, the Past Lives Construction team is managing upkeep and build-outs at the Circuit Bouldering gyms, replacing a house roof and even working on some large-scale artworks for a new apartment building in Northeast Portland. One of Valenti’s project managers, Noelle, is also an accomplished muralist; another team member, Jack, has made puppets and high-end theater sets. “The cool thing is that Past Lives brings together the art and construction side of things. So there’s this unique point of view,” Valenti says. 

Case in point: Past Lives Construction just got the commission to make mushroom stools and giant insects for a Ren-fest-style event called Fantasy Fair. “So we’re sort of all over the map!” Valenti says. This kind of out-of-the-box creativity excites Valenti — and her team. 

“That’s where I really see an opportunity: Let’s make our spaces reflect our community more. As opposed to just the same old cookie-cutter, mass-produced everything. How can we make this more bespoke?” she says. 

Past Lives regularly hosts events, including art shows and live music. Courtesy of Past Lives

Morlock says this kind of synergy with fine artists of all stripes gives Past Lives Construction a competitive edge: “What general contracting firm have you ever heard of that has in-house stained glass fabrication?” 

Brandon Lamb, 44, is a recent addition to the construction team and he couldn’t be happier. Not only does the work pay well — “it’s the best money I’ve made in quite a long time,” he says — the community at Past Lives has helped him in personal ways, too. “It’s working on relationships and things like that,” he says. “I come from a different background. So I’m learning about people and how they should be treated. Equality. I hadn’t had the chance to understand it because I’ve been in prison so long.” When I ask what he means by “different background,” he doesn’t hesitate to explain: “A background of drug addiction and crime. I’ve been in prison three times.” 

In prison, Lamb also worked for Oregon Corrections Enterprises — in the call center, the garment factory and as a wildland firefighter. “It changed my life,” he says. “I learned work ethic, accountability. You have to be on time.” That’s where he met Mosley, now facilities director at Past Lives.

The two stayed in touch after Mosley’s release, and Lamb saw him as a beacon of hope. “You see somebody, and their example is showing success…” he pauses. “Nathan showed constant success with the steps he was making and he was working here.” When Lamb got out, he had heard so much about the community at Past Lives “and all the amazing artists it holds inside its walls.” He started hanging around the place — helping in any way he could. “It led to a full-time job with Design/Build at a great wage,” he says. 

Now Lamb is very much a part of the community. “He’s a joy,” says Valenti. He also does maintenance on machinery in the wood shop as a work-trade, which gives him access to the equipment. He’s even picked up smaller jobs from other members. “There’s a camaraderie here,” Lamb says. “Everybody treats one another with respect.”  

Bicycles used to be Made in the U.S.A.—a New Bill Aims to Bring them Back

Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer talks about his push for American-made bicycles and the power of bikes to make cities more livable.

I did a Q&A with Congressman Bluenauer for Fast Co. in July.

 

After 28 years in Congress, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) has announced he’s retiring at the end of 2024. A cycling enthusiast known for his advocacy on everything from public transportation to cannabis legalization, Blumenauer isn’t leaving the halls of Congress without a final fight. Last month, he introduced legislation that would reinvigorate bicycle manufacturing in the U.S.

In March 1974, Fortune magazine documented the country’s “Bicycle Craze,” citing homegrown manufacturers like Murray and Huffman (Ohio), Schwinn (Chicago), and AMF (Ohio, Arkansas, and Illinois). But after demand fell off in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, brands looked for ways to cut costs and ultimately shifted production to other countries, like China. In 2022, 97.8% of bikes sold in the U.S.—electric and people-powered—were imported. Blumenauer’s Domestic Bicycle Production Act aims to incentivize American companies to make bicycles again through a mix of tariff suspensions, tax credits, and loans. Fast Company spoke to Blumenauer about his first bicycle memory, how bicycles have the power to bridge the political divide, and why America can and should be a powerhouse of bicycle manufacturing once again.

[Photo: Office of Rep. Blumenauer]

You’ve long been a cycling advocate. What turned you on to cycling, and when?

I remember being 5-years-old and learning to ride a bike. I actually rode a bicycle to school in first and second grades [in Portland]. I’m not a monster cyclist like some. But I’ve enjoyed cycling for recreation purposes and for transportation purposes. Some of my favorite vacations were peddling. I continue to walk or bike to work every day.

What’s your commute like in D.C., where you are right now?

It’s nothing! I live less than a mile away [from the Capitol]. It saved time and money not bringing the car back here.

Has it gotten safer in recent years as D.C. has improved its cycling infrastructure?

Yes. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of: being part of developing the bike infrastructure on Capitol Hill. I led the charge to put bike lanes down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a really terrific addition to the city landscape. But putting a bike lane down the middle of one of the most well-known streets in America also had a very powerful symbolic benefit.

 

When I first came to D.C., there was only one other member of Congress who regularly rode a bike—a guy named Dave Minge from Minnesota. I’d mostly encounter a few random bike messengers. That has changed dramatically. Part of it is the expansion of the city bike program. But part of it is that we’ve promoted it here on Capitol Hill. Every day, you see staffers walking past with their helmets and their backpacks. People recognize that it’s a healthy, fast, economic way to transport—and it’s fun. And when you pull up to somebody at a stop light on a bike, there’s no road rage, there’s no snarling.

Portland is world-renowned for its bike culture. I love the bike “greenways” like Salmon and Ankeny—lower-traffic streets where bikes and cars share the roadway. What can other cities emulate about Portland when it comes to cycling safety and infrastructure?

Bike boulevards are something that are taking hold, in part because they work. They promote safer bicycle transportation but, also, when you put facilities like that in—it encourages others to ride a bike.

The bike and traffic-calming strategy on Harrison & Lincoln [in southeast Portland] has not only made it safe to cycle but it has made a difference in terms of the quality of life in the neighborhood. Since we put in that facility [a designated space engineered for bikes], property values went up. Not only is it more attractive, pleasant, and safe—people recognize it and it’s a more valuable place to invest.  

What can Portland and other cities do better, as bike and pedestrian accidents are rising?

Part of what we’re seeing is the hangover effects of COVID. People are less attentive, less patient. It’s disturbing. We are watching an epidemic of bike and pedestrian injuries and fatalities. We’re losing ground when we shouldn’t. We’re investing huge sums of money now through the infrastructure legislation we passed [the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act]. There are 473 communities that have a federally-funded planning process for bike and pedestrian activity. We’re putting an extra $1 billion per year into facilities. And it’s really encouraging.

[Photo: Office of Rep. Blumenauer]

Let’s talk about your bill, the Domestic Bicycle Production Act, which would incentivize U.S. manufacturers to produce bicycles here—specifically e-bikes. Why is domestic manufacturing so important? What is your ultimate vision for this bill?

Early manufacturing efforts for bicycles really were the cornerstone for the manufacturing [transformation] in the United States. In fact, the bicycle was also the foundation for the aeronautics industry. It was a couple of bicycle mechanics—the Wright Brothers—who developed the airplane. Over 110 years ago, there was a bicycle messenger service in Seattle that grew into UPS. There are a whole host of jobs related to the manufacturing function of bicycles, and we’ve lost that. We have a tiny percentage of bicycles made in the United States these days: less than 2%.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We want to make sure that we make it easier to manufacture bicycles here. First, we suggest in this legislation: Place a 10-year tariff suspension on the importation of components needed to build a bike. This is an important cost benefit. We want to encourage companies to manufacture electric bikes by building a transferable e-bike production tax credit. And finally, we want to help expand our existing manufacturing base by providing loans to purchase equipment and increase capacity for domestic bicycle manufacturing facilities.

We think if we can take these steps, we can help build the momentum again for manufacturing bikes in the United States. And in Portland, as you know, there are a number of firms that make handmade bikes. They tend to be pricey—well, not as expensive as your first car or your first house. They’re really fabulous. We want to build on that momentum.

But also make bicycles that are more affordable for everyone, I’m assuming.
Yep!

The Biden Administration is planning big tariffs on Chinese goods, including e-bike batteries and other components. Your bill wants to exempt these items from such tariffs. Why are tariff exemptions a crucial part of this plan to build up domestic infrastructure? 

 

We have a significant tariff burden, in terms of what we’re trying to do to push back some on the Chinese. I don’t want to fight that battle. I just want to make sure we’re not putting the burden on U.S. manufacturers as we’re trying to get this off the ground. This is something strategically that’s been done in the United States for 120 years—back to when Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were presidents. Giving domestic manufacturing a bit of a break with tariff rates.

Do you really think it needs a 10-year suspension? Couldn’t it be done in five years?

We’re not talking about a temporary, short-term initiative. We’re talking about readjusting the mindset to domestic bicycle manufacturing. We want to build up the infrastructure, we want to create a market, have people thinking about a bike that’s made in America. We ought to be able to provide that benefit, so these companies can get established and grow. I think in the course of 10 years, they’ll be able to function on their own. We’ve got a real problem competing with bikes from China. They are massively subsidized by the Chinese government. And this is a way to help offset that.

Does the Domestic Bicycle Production Act have a chance of passing this divided Congress? 

I don’t know. We’re building support; we’re urging people to help us. There are people who are eager to be doing domestic manufacturing. We’re adding their voices. It’s not something that gets massive pushback from big organizations and special interests. So if things go right, it might be possible to tuck it into legislation that’s going to pass toward the end of the year. This is the most efficient form of transportation in the world, and we want to make sure the United States is part of this growing movement. 

You launched the Congressional Bike Caucus in 1996. What does it do? Who else is on it?

I founded it to make the federal government a better partner for livable communities: places where people are safe, healthy, and economically secure. This agenda does not have to be partisan. I talk a lot about “bike-partisanship” because I believe bikes are something that can bring us together rather than divide us. My friends Vern Buchanan (R-Florida) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) co-chair the Caucus with me. It’s made up of more than 80 members across the political spectrum. 

How have the Caucus’s goals changed over the last 30 years? It seems like general bicycle awareness has gone up but also cars have gotten bigger and safety hasn’t improved. Most cities are totally blowing their Vision Zero goals.

When I first came to Congress in 1996, bike infrastructure only received a sliver of all federal transportation spending. Today, we’ve created a national movement shaping communities large and small. There’s a gusher of funds available to build out pedestrian and bike infrastructure. This is the first administration where we’ve had a president that is so committed to rebuilding America. Now it is about implementation, helping communities take advantage of the funding to build safer, more connected networks.

Despite this progress, the transportation industry has not done its part. Cars are bigger, which makes it harder to see pedestrians. And as I mentioned earlier, we haven’t fully recovered from the recklessness seen during COVID.

We need to take seriously the safety of all road users, not just motorists. Many places are just starting to build out cycling infrastructure, and we should double down on these investments. We can also do more to harness technology like automatic emergency breaking for cyclists and pedestrians that would prevent crashes from happening in the first place. 

What are your plans after you retire from Congress?

After 28 years in Congress, I’m looking forward to spending less time on airplanes and more time in Portland, helping the city regain its balance. As a local elected official, I helped Portland become one of the most livable cities in America. I’m convinced we earn back that reputation. There are important projects that can help revitalize our community. I look forward to continuing this work as a civilian. 

Billie Jean King Wants to Change the Playbook for Female Founders

 

 

I got to interview tennis legend Billie Jean King and her wife Ilana Kloss for Inc.'s April 2024 Female Founders issue.  

 

One detail you may not know about tennis icon Billie Jean King: She's long been a savvy businessperson.

Before she made history more than 50 years ago for trouncing former men's tennis champion Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes, King co-owned several tennis tournaments. She was then in her 20s, and her portfolio included the Oakland Pro Championships and the Billie Jean King Invitational, which was part of the all-women Virginia Slims series.

A year earlier, in 1972, King refused to play in the next year's U.S. Open unless all the women playing got paid the same as the men. However, she didn't just protest; she actively worked behind the scenes to secure a sponsor. "I did that so I could go to [tournament promoter] Billy Talbert and tell him, 'We have the money!' " says the now 80-year-old King. ­"Because money is everything in these situations." (Bristol Myers agreed to be the sole sponsor--and the U.S. Open became the first of the majors to offer equal prize money to women.)

Equal pay has continued to elude ­female athletes, but a shift is taking place as interest in women's sports spikes. ­In 2024, global revenue generated across the category is expected to surpass $1 billion for the first time, according to a recent report from Deloitte's Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications. That same report predicted that women's elite sports team valuations would continue rising in 2024, with added clubs exceeding the $100 million threshold.

In a year when the business of women's sports is finally getting its due, Billie Jean King stands out not only for her pioneering efforts to elevate the field, but also for continuing to stay relevant. Through the Randolph, New Jersey-based Billie Jean King Enterprises, an investment and consulting firm, King and her wife, Ilana Kloss, 68, have invested in six sports, from volleyball to hockey. And they've invested in startups like Kinlò, the skin care line for people with melanated skin founded by 26-year-old tennis phenom Naomi Osaka, and the media company Just Women's Sports, led by 30-year-old former soccer star Haley Rosen.

But being a sympathetic investor is only part of King's appeal. "Billie is a legend and a mentor," says Osaka. "I have grown up in awe of her."

And she's not alone. From the tennis court to the C-suite, women and men have found continued pride and inspiration in King's trailblazing moves all those years ago. And while it can seem somewhat commonplace these days to hear about women playing to sold-out shows and standing up to massive corporations--Taylor Swift is just the most prominent recent example--doing so was far less typical 50 years ago.

"Billie took on the risk of saying, 'This isn't right, and we're going to do it the right way, whether we're successful or not,' " says Julie Uhrman, co-founder and president of Angel City Football Club, Los Angeles's new pro women's soccer team. Like King, Uhrman also landed on Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders list. King and Kloss invested in Angel City in 2020, and Uhrman says their support and mentorship has meant the world. She recalls how right before the club launched, Kloss sent a video of King telling the team how proud she was. King said, "Keep up the good work!"

"It was so meaningful coming from someone who laid the groundwork," Uhrman says. "Someone who did fight against the system, who did strive for a better future, who did break barriers and continues to break barriers and recognizes how challenging and difficult it is and how many people get in your way."

That King and Kloss are fiercely committed to investing in women's sports makes sense. The WNBA's combined viewership across all networks grew 67 percent from 2022 to 2023, as the league's overall partnership revenue notched double-­digit growth. For BJKE, that's translated to annual revenue growth of 35 percent in 2023 over the year prior; the company declined to provide a specific number.

"People are thinking of women's sports as a great investment now--not just helping us or being nice to us," says King. "We're actually a good investment."

Billie Jean King in play at the US Open on September 1st, 1973.Photo: Getty Images

 

That's part of the impetus behind her company's role in propping up the new six-team Professional Women's Hockey League, with L.A. Dodgers co-owners and spouses Mark and Kimbra Walter. Creating the league took over five years, says King, who credits Kloss, BJKE's CEO, with doing the bulk of the work. "We're really thrilled that happened, because now the little girls have their dream. That's what I want," King says. "The boys have had their dream for 100 years, and the girls haven't--not at this level."

It's the kind of messaging King is game for as executive producer of Groundbreakers, too. The PBS documentary celebrates Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools and other education programs, through the stories of prominent women athletes. BJKE is partnering with the International Tennis Federation and TWG Global to market all of the commercial rights for the Billie Jean King Cup, billed as the premiere international women's tennis competition. In 2022, the company launched Trailblazer Venture Studio in partnership with three other companies. Also under the auspices of BJKE, King and Kloss do consulting work and leadership training for sports organizations as varied as the NFL and the National Women's Soccer League.

Right now, the pair's focus is on helping women's sports get media exposure across all platforms--which can translate into more money for women athletes. A study released in 2023 by talent-­management and marketing firm Wasserman found that women's sports averaged about 15 percent of media broadcasts, streaming, social media, and digital publications--up from around 13 percent in 2019. "If you get 15 percent exposure, you're never going to get as much money," says Kloss. "But that's starting to change across every platform."

King knows how much representation matters, especially to children. When she was 9 years old, she went with her parents and brother on Mother's Day to see a minor league baseball game at L.A.'s Wrigley Field. "Sitting there, I had this jolt through my gut and my heart: I cannot play baseball because I'm a girl," King says. "On the way home, I was really upset. Very quiet. My parents said, 'Are you all right?' And I said yes, but I wasn't, obviously. It made a big impression. I think it helped shape my life."

Four years later, when she was 13, she found early inspiration in Althea Gibson, the first Black person to win a Grand Slam event. "She was the first No. 1 in the world I ever saw in person," King says. "I was 13. I remember how excited I was that day. I went, 'She is so good. How am I ever going to be that good?' "

Adds King of Gibson, "You have to see it to be it."

People should never feel like they can't do something because the system isn't built for them, King says. It means the system needs to be rebuilt, which, she adds, the women and men who come next will have to do.

"My parents always taught us that every generation gets better," King says. Rest assured, future generations will still be looking to her for inspiration.

Michael Mohr Grew Up Watching Movies in His Cousin's Basement With Seth Rogen...

Now They Run a Thriving Cannabis Brand 

Inside the creative minds behind Houseplant, a weed-focused lifestyle brand aiming to class-up cannabis.

I wrote this profile of Michael Mohr, Seth Rogen's accomplished business partner and friend, for Inc.'s package on Celebrity Counterparts. 

See here for the full article:{Download MichaelMohr}

 

 

 

Shattered Glass

Oregon's glass bottle recycling rates may be some of the highest in the nation, but with the state's only glass recycling plant temporarily shuttered, where is the rest of our used glass being carted off to? And is glass recycling as green as environmentalists once thought? 

Hannah Wallace reports for Oregon Business Magazine.  Click here to read the full story on OBM's site, or see below.

Oregon’s Bottle Bill, passed in 1971, is famous for being America’s first bottle bill. It was also the country’s first “extended producer responsibility” program, before that term was even coined. In the bill, legislators made beverage distributors (or manufacturers who self-distribute) responsible for reimbursing grocery stores for the refund value. Consumers then pay the deposit when they buy beer or other beverages, but they recoup that when they return the bottles. 

The whole point of the deposit is to incentivize consumers to reliably return the bottles and cans — and it has worked. The Bottle Bill has undergone many updates over the years:   adding bottled water (2009); the Green Bag program (2010); juice, tea, coconut water and other beverage containers (2018); and canned wine (2022). In 2017 the deposit doubled to 10 cents per bottle, resulting in a spike in returns. According to the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative (OBRC), Oregon had a bottle redemption rate of 85.5% in 2022. 

A driver from Thompson Recycling unloads about 42,000 pounds of glass trucked up from Newport to the Glass To Glass facility in North Portland. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan.

Nine other states have followed Oregon’s lead, but when it comes to cans and bottles, Oregon still has the highest recycling rate in the country. In August the Container Recycling Institute, a national beverage container recycling think tank, announced that Oregon’s redemption rate is the best in the nation, followed by Maine, with a redemption rate of 78%. 

Much of this success has to do with OBRC, the not-for-profit formed in 2009 by Oregon beverage distributors to efficiently collect empty bottles and cans from retail partners and consumers and sort them by material. OBRC does this via 27 full-service redemption centers across the state, six of which are also processing plants. 

“We have a statewide network for return infrastructure, the Green Bag program at redemption centers, all coming back through one fully integrated stream,” says Eric Chambers, vice president of strategy and outreach at OBRC. All of this means cleaner bottles and cans, which are a desirable commodity. The glass bottles that OBRC collects from across the state are crushed into “cullet” and sold to Portland-based glass recycler Glass to Glass. 

Clear glass cullet at Glass To Glass. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan.

But what about the glass that doesn’t have a deposit on it — the used pickle jars, peanut butter containers and wine bottles that Portlanders (and residents of other Oregon cities) put in our glass-only bins each week? None of those are collected by OBRC. And what do rural Oregonians who don’t have curbside recycling do with their used glass bottles? 

I’d heard whisperings that much of that glass ends up in landfill, since low-income Oregonians can’t afford to pay additional fees for recycling services — and some can’t easily drive to recycling depots. If that’s true, then glass, I realized, is not the environmental best choice many of us think it is. It takes a lot of energy to make. Glass cullet, limestone, sand and soda ash are heated to 2,600 to 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit; the process of making glass emits toxic pollution; and it’s heavy, which means it’s both expensive and puts more carbon into the atmosphere to truck it across the country. According to a 2014 study commissioned by the Wine Institute in California, glass bottles account for 29% of wine’s carbon footprint — the single biggest factor. (That’s not even factoring in that some winemakers order their glass bottles from China.) 

Wanting to get to the bottom of where and how Oregon’s glass is recycled, I first called Bob Hippert, Sustainability Strategy Leader at O-I Glass, the Ohio company that owns Oregon’s only glass furnace. Hippert confirmed that all the glass that OBRC collects at six of its processing plants around the state is crushed, then taken to an O-I subsidiary, Glass to Glass, where the cullet is sorted into three different color streams: amber, green and clear. Typically, the sorted cullet is sent to the O-I Glass plant, five miles down the road, but since midsummer, that facility has been on a “hot hold.” (Hippert says that’s due to a lack of interest from the Oregon wine industry in recycled-glass wine bottles, which is what the plant typically makes.) Instead, the amber and green cullet is currently going up to O-I’s facility in Kalama, Wash., 45 minutes north, where it’s used to make green wine bottles. Currently, the flint (clear) cullet is being shipped to out-of-state O-I plants—typically in California and Colorado—and remade into glass bottles there. 

Graphic by Joan McGuire

Hippert sings the praises of OBRC, which recovers 45,000 tons (90 million pounds) of glass from Oregonians every year. “Oregon is the best state in the country as far as recycling glass,” he tells me. “I wish I had 50 Oregons around the country. We wouldn’t be struggling to hit some of our aspirational goals when it comes to recycled content.”  

When Portland’s O-I Glass plant was operational, it made bottles with 70% recycled glass — a very high percentage. (The industry average in recycled glass bottles is nearly 40%.) Lange Estate Winery in the Willamette Valley is a client; winemaker Jesse Lange says he’s proud to support domestic glassmakers. In June 2023, the O-I plant in Portland laid off 81 employees and began a “hot hold” of its furnace. In 2021 regulators at the state Department of Environmental Quality fined the company $1 million for repeated air quality violations at its Portland facility. O-I agreed to install new equipment to control pollution (and the DEQ reduced the fine to $662,000), but Hippert insists that’s not the reason for the hot hold. (The company was fined another $213,600 in August for violations from July 2022 and this past May.) The company needs to install pollution controls by May 2024, per their 2021 settlement with the DEQ.  

Glass To Glass facility in North Portland. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

But, I realized, I still didn’t know where our non-Bottle Bill glass goes. Oregon Metro — the regional government elected by voters in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties to oversee land use and waste collection in the greater Portland area — sets the standards for recycling and manages the trash and recycling system in cooperation with local governments, which award contracts to haulers. So I called Rosalynn Greene, the strategic initiatives director at Metro’s Waste Prevention and Environmental Services department. Metro has two transfer stations: one in Northwest (Metro North) and one in Oregon City (Metro South). But those only process a fraction of the Portland area’s trash. Trash haulers — including Heiberg, Portland Disposal & Recycling Inc., and Waste Management of Oregon — are the entities that collect our trash and our glass (at least in the Portland area). Heiberg sells its glass jars and bottles directly to Glass to Glass; glass containers collected by Waste Management are taken to Environmental Fibers International and Far West Recycling, both of which deliver it to Glass to Glass. Outside of the Metro area, San Francisco-based Recology collects glass curbside in 30 Oregon cities and counties — including Ashland, McMinnville and Tillamook County. It also operate material recovery facilities (MRFs) and recycling drop-off depots. All of the glass it collects is consolidated at Recology transfer stations and then transported to O-I’s Glass to Glass facility in the Portland area. So far, it was sounding like most of Oregon’s glass — at least the glass that’s collected curbside — is sold to Glass to Glass, to be made into new bottles either in Kalama, Wash., or O-I plants in other states. 

The U.S. has an abysmally low glass recycling rate: 31.3% of glass is turned into a recycling program according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In Oregon that number is better: 75% according to the DEQ. (That figure includes Bottle Bill recycling.) Part of that has to do with the Bottle Bill infrastructure, but also it has to do with Metro fighting for a separate glass bin, at least in the greater Portland region. 

“We have advocated for it and required local governments to separate glass because of the material quality issue,” says Metro’s Greene. Even in Seattle, which is in a Bottle-
Bill state, residents throw their glass into a mixed-recycling bin. “As you can imagine, when all the materials go to a MRF [Materials Recovery Facility], it’s hard to pull out glass from paper when it’s wet,” Greene says. “There are issues when it’s commingled and getting that material out of it.” 

When people throw everything from soiled food containers to used Keurig pods into the commingled bin, the glass ends up in a sorry state. So in states that don’t have a separate sorting mechanism for glass, the dirtier glass from MRFs ends up as cover for landfills (literally, a top layer to keep other trash from blowing away), according to Peter Spendelow, a natural-resource specialist at the DEQ. 

“That’s a pretty worthless use,” he says. The clean stream of glass OBRC and trash haulers supply to companies like Glass to Glass means that most of Oregon’s glass actually gets recycled and not thrown into landfills.

According to the DEQ, about 70% of Oregon’s population has access to curbside recycling and another 13% has access to depots only, where people can drop off their recycling. That leaves 17% of Oregonians who don’t have convenient access to glass recycling of any kind. In those remote corners of the state  — places like Malheur or Lake counties — it’s likely that most people’s trash ends up in the landfill.  (These figures do not include Bottle Bill glass, which OBRC collects weekly in all parts of the state.)  The consistency of recycling across the state will improve when the new Recycling Modernization Act goes into effect in 2025. Passed during the 2021 Oregon legislative session, the RMA is a producer-responsibility law that will require the formation of producer-responsibility organizations (PROs) that will be responsible for making sure their packaging materials are recycled in “responsible end markets.” (Rule-makers are still working out how to enforce this.) The RMA will expand recycling services across the state, upgrade recycling facilities, and create a uniform statewide collection list so that whether you live in Burns or Astoria, the same materials will be collected for recycling. In November, rule-makers at the DEQ approved a uniform statewide collection list.  

One of the things that makes glass superior as a packaging type is that it can be recycled  an infinite amount of times. 

“There’s not a maximum amount of times glass bottle can be remelted,” says Hippert at O-I. But even better for the environment than recycling glass is refilling it, which you can do up to 50 times. In 2018 OBRC launched a refillable bottle program for beer bottles. 

“Because of our high redemption rate, and our vertically integrated system, we have a high degree of confidence that they’d come back into our system,” says Chambers at OBRC. 

OBRC created two custom bottles (12 ounce and 500 ml, both made by O-I) embossed with the words “Bottle Drop” and debossed with the words “Refillable” and “Please return.” Right now they have 11 partners, mostly brewers, including Double Mountain, Gigantic, Ancestry and Buoy. They even have two winemakers — Pierce Wines and Coopers Hall Wine — and one cidermaker, Röder Apfelwein. Collectively, these 11 partners have 137 individual SKUs in the OBRC system totaling 2.8 million refillable bottles. While that’s a small percentage of the overall market, it’s the only statewide refillable-bottle program in the nation. For Chambers, this pilot project is proof of concept. 

One of the biggest evangelists for refillable bottles (and also OBRC’s first refillable partner) is Matt Swihart of Double Mountain Brewery in Hood River. He’s done his homework. Experts he’s interviewed say that not only do refillable glass bottles have a 90% lower carbon footprint than single-use bottles, they are far superior to aluminum cans, which rely on bauxite (a rock that needs to be strip-mined from the earth) and are lined with plastic. Finally, he says, beer out of glass bottles tastes better, because less oxygen gets in during the bottling process. On the OBRC website, Swihart explains a big perk of the refillable-bottle program during COVID: “During the pandemic, almost every brewer I knew was panicking [about] package supplies with shortages of both aluminum and glass,” Swihart said on the OBRC site. “But we’ve been great with a bunch of stock in Clackamas, so we haven’t had major interruptions or changes in pricing.” 

The same supply-chain issues hit the wine industry. Chinese-made wine bottles were either stuck in ports or delayed due to pandemic shutdowns, which meant, in many cases, that U.S. winemakers couldn’t bottle their wine. A new venture has sprung up to offer a local refillable wine bottle program here in Oregon — at a much larger scale. Keenan O’Hern and Adam Rack are the passionate duo behind Revino, which will be introducing a refillable wine bottle in the Willamette Valley in 2024. 

From left to right: The prototypes for Revino’s refillable screwcap and cork bottles; refillable (“multiuse”) bottle; and an OBRC BottleDrop refillable bottle. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan.

There are many reasons why winemakers want refillable bottles: One, they want a reliable supply of locally made glass. (The Revino bottle will be made by O-I.) Others want the bottles for environmental reasons. That’s the case for Donna Morris and Bill Sweat at Winderlea Vineyard & Winery, who have been working to find a lighter bottle. (The heavier the bottle, the higher the carbon emissions.) In 2006, when they made their first vintage, their bottles were 830 grams. The ones they order from Saverglass’ facility in Mexico are 600 grams. Revino’s will be 495 grams. They plan to start using Revino bottles for a few select wines they sell in the testing room, but hope to go big as Revino grows. “It would be our goal that 100% of our glass will be in refillable,” Sweat says. 

Pat Dudley at Bethel Heights Vineyard, who is a co-founder of the Oregon Oak Accord (her husband, Ted, founded the LIVE Certification), is also switching to Revino, at least for four wines the winery serves exclusively in the tasting room.  

She says the concept has been proposed in the Valley before but the hurdles have thus far been insurmountable. “I hate to say this, but I think one of the main holdups has been the attachment of winemakers to the bottle styles,” she says. The other challenge is re-collecting the bottles. Both of those would be solved by Revino. 

When Revino is up and running this spring, it’ll have regular collection routes through the Willamette Valley.  The company, which already has its first van, will collect empty Revino bottles from tasting rooms and take them to a facility to wash them. (O’Hern and Rack will store the bottles at a warehouse until their wash facility is up and running.) Wineries would receive a credit on future glass purchases for each bottle returned through Revino’s pick-up route. The duo estimates that a case of Revino bottles will cost $12. O’Hern and Rack are also in discussions with OBRC to include Revino bottles in the OBRC return system. If that happens, then any consumer could return their Revino bottle to an OBRC redemption center, and OBRC would sort them out from other bottles. Revino would then pick up the bottles from OBRC and send them to their own facility for cleaning. 

The second hurdle — wine bottle style — is something that O’Hern and Rack are working on. They plan to have one style initially: an antique green Burgundy bottle (both cork and screw-cap finishes). But depending on interest from the Finger Lakes wine region and other areas they’re in talks with, they may do a Bordeaux-style bottle or a riesling bottle after that. A sparkling-wine bottle may even be on the horizon. “We’ll let the market and winery partners influence our decisions,” Rack says. Ultimately, if all goes well in Oregon, they hope to have multiple facilities across the country so that eventually wineries could use refillable Revino bottles even for their far-flung wine-club sales. 

Dudley thinks Oregon winemakers are finally ready to embrace this refillable program and notes that in Europe, these programs have been in place for a long time. “I think there has been enough push in that direction [sustainability] that winemakers are starting to feel obliged to give up that silliness about the bottle weight and the bottle shape,” Dudley says. “Let your label be your brand!”

Many prestige Willamette Valley brands, in addition to Bethel Heights and Winderlea, have committed to ordering Revino bottles including Adelsheim, Brick House, Brooks, Cameron, Illahe, Walter Scott and Soter. So far 56 winemakers from up and down the Willamette Valley have signed on with 60+ more showing interest.

Keenan O’Hern, left, and Adam Rack, the founders of Revino bottles, show prototype bottles at Coopers Hall in Southeast Portland. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan.

O’Hern, whose mom is Dutch, grew up regularly visiting Holland, where no one thinks twice about bringing their reusable glass bottles back to the store. “It’s just a way of life over there. You put it back in the crate, bring it back to the shop and they wash it and reuse it,” says O’Hern, who got his MBA at George Fox University and has worked in digital marketing education and as a management consultant. Rack was the operations manager and assistant winemaker at Coopers Hall, an urban winery and wine bar that has exclusively put wine in kegs since it opened in 2014. (Thanks to Rack, it also joined the OBRC refillable program in 2019 with Coopers Hall wines.) 

With glass prices continuing to rise, using the same wine bottle over and over again also makes financial sense for wineries. “If you think about it, the glass wine bottle has value already,” says Rack. “We wash our glassware, we wash our wine glasses. We pay a lot of money for them. Pint glasses at a restaurant or wine glasses are used hundreds of times! These bottles that don’t break when you throw them in the trash because they’re so heavy and thick—we throw them away. And they’re gone. There’s value there!”

Phil Knight ponied up $400 million to help historically Black areas of Portland. Meet the woman investing it.

I wrote a story for Fast Co. about Rukaiyah Adams, CEO of the new 1803 Fund. 

When Rukaiyah Adams took the podium at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, two weeks ago to announce Phil and Penny Knight’s $400 million donation to the 1803 Fund her voice wavered with emotion. It’s understandable why: Thanks to the contributions of the Nike founder and his wife, the scale of the assets she’ll be managing as chair of the newly formed fund will be game-changing for Portland’s Black community, which her family has been a part of for four generations.

“At $400 million, I’ll be managing almost more than all Black women in venture capital,” Adams tells me by phone a week later. “I don’t think there’s a Black woman who has ever raised more than a few million dollars for a historically Black community.”

The 1803 Fund, a public benefit nonprofit, is dedicated to rebuilding and strengthening the historically Black community in North and Northeast Portland. “It’s like a private equity fund for the people,” Adams says. The fund will have three focus areas: education, culture and belonging, and place. Its first project, Rebuild Albina, is focused on investing in the Black neighborhood that was partially razed in the 1950s to make way for Memorial Coliseum, I-5, and Legacy Emanuel Hospital, displacing a vibrant business district and residential community of bungalows, jazz clubs, corner groceries, and churches.

Continue reading here.   Or email me for a copy of the PDF! 

The Snack Bag of the Future Won’t Be Made from Plastic

Companies from Frito-Lay to Kettle Chips are experimenting with corn starch, calcium carbonate and other materials that eschew plastic but preserve taste.

I wrote this story for Bloomberg Green. 

Florencio Cuétara is the kind of person who crosses the street to tell people to pick up their litter. One day, Cuétara, an avid diver, was swimming in the Mediterranean when he came across a plastic cookie bag. “This bag hits me in the face as I’m swimming. And I’m cursing whoever put it in there, as if it’s somebody else’s fault,” Cuétara says. “Then I realized that the bag was one of my bags — with my last name on it.” 

Cuétara’s family business is Switzerland-based snack company Cuétara Foods, which makes 25 brands of cookies, biscuits and crackers sold all over the world. For Florencio, who was CEO for the Americas at the time, that moment was a turning point. “I was like, ‘I want to blame everybody else for this,” he says. “But I’m not an innocent party here. I’m part of the problem.’” 

Most bags for potato chips and other crispy snacks are made with three layers of polymer materials: a moisture barrier on the inside (usually biaxially oriented polypropylene), low-density polyethylene in the middle and an outer layer of thermoplastic resin. From an environmental standpoint, polymers — like all plastics — have two marks against them: They’re made from petroleum, and they’ll never decompose.

 

Today, according to the UN Environment Programme, humans produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste every year. Half of that is single-use plastic, like potato chip bags, that ends up in landfills or in waterways, where it breaks down into microplastics that are consumed by aquatic life, and eventually by people. At the behest of consumers and under the shadow of potential regulation, snack companies big and small are now looking for a way to break that cycle with alternative packaging materials. The only question is who will succeed. 

The great repackaging

Florencio Cuétara swam into his cookie bag in 2015, setting off a four-year quest to find a different packaging material that didn’t rely on fossil fuels. In 2019, Cuétara and Dr. Russ Petrie, an orthopedic surgeon in California, founded Okeanos, which uses calcium carbonate to create bags for snacks, rice, coffee and salt, as well as wraps for flowers. 

Calcium carbonate (CaCO3), a mineral naturally found in stone or rocks, has been used as a filler in packaging before, but only in small percentages. Cuétara and Petrie developed a technology they called “Made from Stone” that is up to 70% calcium carbonate; the rest is made of resin. The company’s bags are both flexible and light — they float on water — and the technology is now used by manufacturers in 15 countries including Brazil, India, Canada, the Philippines and the US. “We were called crazy a number of times,” Cuétara says. 

A flower wrap using Made from Stone packaging.

Courtesy of Okeanos

For Sean Mason and Mark Green, co-founders of British crisps company Two Farmers, it took five years to find a packaging material that would both biodegrade and keep their chips crunchy. “Obviously the single-use plastic that’s in crisp packets is blighting the landscape and the seas,” Mason says. 

Mason also saw a need for consistency. Two Farmers sources all of its potatoes from Green’s farm in Herefordshire, where cover-cropping (planting a crop like clovers or alfalfa after the cash crop) is used to nourish the soil. The farm also has an anaerobic digester that converts farm waste into bio-methane — which in turn produces more than enough electricity to run the entire operation. “Our difference was sustainable farming, so we thought we should see that through to the crisp bag,” Mason says.  

When it came to identifying an alternative material, though, Mason and Green were stumped. First, they considered cardboard boxes. “We suddenly realized that we would still have to put a plastic bag inside to keep it fresh,” Mason says. “So we were effectively just over-packaging; packaging for packaging’s sake.” Next they looked at tins — “too expensive and probably too much waste for a small 40-gram packet.” Finally, at a packaging trade show they came across eucalyptus cellulose films in their raw state, and started talking to the producers about their potential for crisps bags. 

What on Earth?

The duo found a laminator, which helped them figure out how to add plant-based glues and inks for printing. After producing the film, they sent it off to TŪV Austria — a third-party certifier that verifies whether packaging is compostable — to have it tested for compostability and eco-toxicity. Following some trial and error, their material passed muster, and in 2019 Two Farmers officially launched its gourmet potato chips in 100% compostable packaging made from eucalyptus cellulose. Mason, who credits David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II with helping put single-use plastics on Brits’ radar, says his company’s bags take 30 to 36 weeks to decompose in home composting systems, or 11 weeks in an industrial composter. 

The eucalyptus film is much more expensive than plastic — over 10 times the cost, to be exact — and each packet retails for £1.20 ($1.40). But quality hasn’t been an issue: Last year, Two Farmers’ Woodland Mushroom & Wild Garlic and Herefordshire Sausage & Mustard flavors won the Great British Food award in the Savoury Snacks category. 

Big Chip

There are thousands of companies making snacks all over the world, but any progress on plastic packaging will have to involve a few big ones. In the world of US potato chips, for example, Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo Inc., has a whopping 60% of the market share, according to data analytics firm IRI Worldwide.  

Frito-Lay North America began its own foray into alternative packaging over a decade ago, with the 2009 debut of a 100% compostable bag for SunChips. Made from 90% polylactic acid, the bag was notoriously noisy when opened or handled — up to 95 decibels, by some accounts — and Frito-Lay discontinued it in 2010. 

Frito-Lay has made quieter headway since, and the company has a goal of making all of its packaging 100% recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or re-usable by 2025. In 2021, it debuted a bag made of 85% polylactic acid — typically composed of corn starch — for two of its Off the Eaten Path veggie chips. (The rest is made of aluminum coatings, inks and adhesives.) 

The Off the Eaten Path bag is industrially compostable, which means it can be put into city compost systems. The bags can also be sent back via a free shipping label to New Jersey-based TerraCycle, which partners with Frito-Lay on the venture. (Though questions have been raised about the effectiveness of TerraCycle’s plastics recycling program, which involves third-party facilities.)

“We’re going through a test and learn phase [with Off the Eaten Path] as we work towards our ultimate goal of designing 100% of our packaging to be either recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or re-usable,” says David Allen, vice president and chief sustainability officer for Pepsi-Co Foods North America. 

Also in the US, Salem, Oregon-based Kettle Foods Inc., which makes the popular Kettle Chips brand, will debut a Made from Stone bag this spring, starting with its sea salt flavor. 

The Off the Eaten Path bag can be put into a city compost system.

Off the Eaten Path

Looming regulations

Companies that aren’t moving towards plastic-free packaging yet may be forced to in the future, as regulators start to step in. Last year, the European Union proposed new rules that would require companies selling products in EU countries to make their packaging easier to reuse, recycle or compost. The rules would also limit unnecessary empty space in packaging, part of an overall goal to to reduce packaging waste by 5% by 2030, compared to 2018 levels. If effective, the EU could set a standard for other nations to follow.

But the hurdles remain enormous, and snack bags are just one piece of a much bigger problem. Most developing countries don’t have recycling or composting facilities, and in the nations that do, those systems are often broken or dysfunctional. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates a US plastic recycling rate of just below 9%, while Beyond Plastics, a project out of Bennington College, pegs it at an even bleaker 5% to 6%. In the EU, almost 38% of plastic was recycled in 2020, and regulations imposed in 2021 halted the sale of the 10 most common plastics to wash up on European beaches, including bottle caps and straws. But addressing plastic packaging writ large will require changes at every part of its life cycle: from raw materials to duration of use to the nature of disposal. “Even with recycling, you increase emissions,” says Cuétara at Okeanos. “And remember: You can only recycle a number of times.” 

Those hurdles are part of why Cuétara says Made from Stone bags are catching on: Packaging manufacturers can keep using their existing equipment, and calcium carbonate is naturally abundant with relatively stable pricing. 

“If somebody came to my potato chip company and said, ‘I want you to change everything and get rid of your suppliers and it’s going to cost you more,’ the answer would be, ‘Thank you, but we have no interest,’” he says. “I have to tell you, there’s been almost no calls of, ‘We don’t want to do it.’ It’s an impossible thing to say no to.’”  

 

 

Zero-Waste Stores are Helping Consumers Cut Back on Plastic

Across the U.S., a growing number of new retailers are selling mostly in bulk to customers toting reusable containers. 

I wrote this piece about zero-waste stores for Bloomberg Green on Aug. 18, 2022.   See PDF here: Download ‘Zero-Waste’ Stores Are Helping Consumers Cut Back on Plastic - Bloomberg

Buzzkill: the Rise and Fall of Sex Toy Company Lora DiCarlo

This story appeared in the Feb. issue of Oregon Business Magazine. 

 

In November of 2022, Thor Mikelic was working on social marketing and email campaigns for an upcoming promotion of Lora DiCarlo vibrators.

Co-owner of the Newburgh, New York-based sex-toy company SheVibe, Mikelic was excited about the collaboration. Mikelic’s buyer had even scheduled the promotion on SheVibe’s social apps. But by late November, there was no inventory left and the Lora DiCarlo website went offline.

“They just disappeared,” Mikelic says.

The sudden demise of Lora DiCarlo, the buzzy Oregon-based sex-tech startup founded by Lora Haddock, is still shrouded in mystery. Business colleagues like Mikelic think reckless spending may have had something to do with it; records obtained by Oregon Business paint a picture quite different from that of the progressive, feminist tech startup Lora DiCarlo touted in its marketing. The company has also faced criticisms of its product’s high price tag and a legal challenge to its claim of technological innovation. “Lora DiCarlo’s products were so overpriced and they were constantly raising money,” Mikelic says. “Something was wrong.”

Indeed, something was very wrong. Three civil rights complaints filed with Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) allege serious improprieties including pervasive sexual harassment, a hostile work environment, sexism and retaliation. (Only one of these cases has been resolved; two are still under investigation.)

 

One complaint, made by CEO Lora Haddock’s former assistant, alleges that on their first business trip together, Haddock “forgot her pajamas” and slept naked in the same room as the assistant, later asking her to touch a mosquito bite on Haddock’s bare bottom. Two complaints allege that both Haddock and her chief operating officer (and then-boyfriend), Doug Layman, made frequent inappropriate sexual comments to their employees — including details about their own sex life. All three former employees — all of whom are women — allege that throughout their employment, male employees were treated better than female employees.

“It was so anti-woman,” says one of these former employees. “Doug constantly was abusive toward women. It sets a tone that you can’t speak up — you are at risk of being attacked, too. The CEO would just sit and cower to whatever Doug says. She didn’t defend anyone or help out in the way a CEO would. She was in charge, but in reality Doug was in charge.”

‘A Gold Brick’

Founded in 2017 by Haddock (who at some point changed her name to Lora Haddock DiCarlo) and her then-romantic partner, Douglas Layman, the company stumbled upon the kind of PR in January 2019 that publicists only dream about. The company won an innovation award for the Osé — its signature toy — at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, only to be unceremoniously kicked out of the show for being “immoral, obscene, indecent, profane” and not in keeping with the show’s image. Their award was revoked.

Publicist Evie Smith Hatmaker, who had the company as a client at the time, remembers this moment fondly.

“I turned to Lora — she was really upset. And I was like, ‘A gold brick just landed on our laps,’” she recalls.

She was right. Haddock wrote an open letter on the Lora DiCarlo website accusing the Consumer Technology Association, which produces the trade show, of gender bias. She also penned an op-ed in The Washington Post. National outlets like The New York Times, Wired and TechCrunch wrote about how sexist and hypocritical it was to allow sex robots and VR porn for straight men into prior CES shows but not a vibrator focused on women’s pleasure. By May CES had offered an apology and restored the prize. When the company finally began taking presale orders for the Osé in late November of 2019, it brought in $1 million in the first five hours, Haddock told Wired. And that was before a prototype of the vibrator was even ready.

A Lora DiCarlo mechanical design engineer displayed a 3D rendering of the Osé on screen in 2019. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

The company, which developed the Osé with Oregon State University’s College of Engineering, spun a narrative of itself as a sex-positive company with a femtech pioneer at the helm. The Osé was also touted as a novel kind of sex toy, with air-pulse technology that stimulates the clitoris the way a mouth might, producing a so-called “blended orgasm.” In November 2020 it scored a coup, bringing on actress and model Cara Delevingne as co-owner and creative adviser.

‘Morally Bankrupt’

But underneath the hype were serious problems, according to several sources interviewed for this article. Haddock, whose tale of self-invention was told differently in every article, never went to med school, even for a semester (as she claimed on the Lora DiCarlo website and in several interviews, according to a 2020 feature in Wired). In a 2020 article for Men’s Health, she’s quoted as saying she’d been in medical school when she had her “holy grail of orgasms” that inspired her to found the company; The New York Times claimed she had served in the Navy. In a 2019 profile in this magazine, we said she’d studied nursing at Portland State University. (Portland State has no record of her ever being enrolled.) The civil rights complaints filed with BOLI allege that Lora DiCarlo was a hostile work environment where women’s views were not valued and where women (at least certain women) were subjected to inappropriate sexual comments, sexual harassment, retaliation based on pregnancy, and racism.

Haddock’s longtime phone number was no longer in service and emails to her company email bounced back. Calls and emails to her lawyer, Scott Oborne at Jackson Lewis P.C., were not returned.

Complaints against the company filed with BOLI allege harassment by both Layman and Haddock, as well as a pattern of racist and gender-based discrimination.

In her civil rights complaint former director of sales and marketing Sarah Brown alleges that “male employees were treated better, more favorably, while female employees were treated as if they were poor at their jobs.” Sherry Tran, who worked in customer service and market research, says in her civil rights complaint that Layman would attack female employees during meetings but not male employees. She also says he would fire female employees with little provocation or warning. Tran, whose complaint is still under investigation, alleges that she was subjected to a hostile work environment based on her race. (She is from Vietnam and identifies as Asian.) Tran also alleges that Haddock and Layman would make inappropriate sexual comments that made her so uncomfortable she would need to walk away from her computer during virtual meetings.

But the most damning charges were from Haddock’s former executive assistant. (OB was not able to reach this complainant; she is named in the complaint, but we are withholding her name due to the nature of the allegations.) In her civil rights complaint, this woman alleged pervasive sexual harassment by Haddock as well as open discrimination against her pregnancy from Haddock and Layman. In her complaint, which was resolved in her favor, she alleges that on their first business trip together, Haddock not only “slept naked in the same room as me, claiming that she forgot her pajamas,” but also that Haddock asked her to touch her bare bottom. She also alleged that multiple times Haddock freely shared details about her sex life with Layman. The complaint says Haddock told employees that she and Layman were part of a sex club in Portland, where they would not engage in sex acts but “will go around and watch other people.” Haddock told the assistant that while she was away on trips, she sent a female friend to Layman “as a present,” and that she is the dominant and Layman is the submissive and “he is ‘her bitch.’” Haddock also told her assistant that she could call Layman “Daddy,” according to the complaint.

The former assistant says that she could not report this to the company’s human resources department because it was run by a friend of Haddock’s. She asked Haddock about policies regarding reporting confidential matters and, this woman states in her complaint, Haddock said that everything should come directly to her because “human resources discloses everything to her anyway.”

In her written response to this BOLI investigation, Haddock denied that she sexually harassed her assistant, slept naked in the same room or asked her assistant to touch her bottom, but said, “The nature of the business also requires discussions related to sex or [that] are sexual in nature.” This former assistant provided multiple witnesses, texts, and emails, and after a thorough yearlong investigation, a BOLI civil rights investigator determined there was substantial evidence of unlawful employment practices including sexual harassment, retaliation for reporting discrimination, and aiding and abetting sexual harassment and retaliation. In March of 2022, Scott Hunt, the complainant’s lawyer, asked BOLI to withdraw the case so he could resolve the matter via private action.

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A number of former employees also allege that — though she was the public face of the company in most media coverage — Haddock was not really running the show at Lora DiCarlo. Instead, they say, Doug Layman was really running the company.

Depending on who you ask, Layman was either the chief operating officer or chief financial officer of Lora DiCarlo, but he was most certainly an investor. Smith Hatmaker says that she heard he had a successful exit from a previous startup and used some of his investor contacts to help get initial funding for Lora DiCarlo.

“He would go into meetings with her to talk to VCs,” Smith Hatmaker says. On the Oregon State University Foundation website, Layman is listed as having been the president and co-founder of Kadix Systems, “a management consulting firm focused on the federal government.” (Kadix sold to Dynamics Research Corps for $42 million in 2008.) In Lora DiCarlo’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, which is filed under Uccellini LLC, Layman is listed as an executive officer for the company. (Records on file with the Oregon Secretary of State’s office show Uccellini LLC, of which Layman was the principal officer, formally dissolved in June 2021, but filed for an authorization to conduct business — with Haddock listed as president — the same day. They also say Portland attorney Mary Hull, who had been listed as a registered agent with the company, resigned from that role on Dec. 8, 2022.)

Layman also did not respond to emails requesting an interview for this story.

Another former employee, who asked not to be named because she fears litigation, said about Layman, “He is Lora DiCarlo — he founded it. Doug was, on paper, never more than an advisor, but in the day-to-day, he was in every meeting. He hired and fired.”

Asked if Layman was in fact running the company, Kim Porter, former director of engineering at Lora DiCarlo from February 2019 to February 2021, says, “Doug had more of a business background than Lora. But was he running the company? I don’t know who was running it…. Neither one of them knew how to get products to market.”

A Glassdoor review from November 2020 headlined “Awful, Toxic Company” seems to sum things up accurately, according to four former staffers interviewed for this story.

“The company that I thought would be the most woke, value-aligned company I could work for turned out to be more unethical and morally bankrupt than I could even fathom…. Executive leadership is manipulative and abusive. Their products aren’t innovative like they claim. It’s not truly a woman-owned, woman-run company as an older cis white male calls all the shots. Lora is merely the face of a shady company heading for failure. Run, don’t walk, away.”

Lora Haddock with a prototype of the Osé in 2019. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

The Osé also got some negative reviews, with sex-toy tester Jess Joho telling a Wired podcaster that using the Osé was “a nightmare.” In that same podcast, journalist Lux Alptraum said the Osé was “excruciatingly painful” to use.

Critics have also pointed out that other companies like Womanizer and Satisfyer used air pulse technology, but that their products listed for far less than the Osé, which cost $290.

The Breakdown

Many former employees contacted for this story refused to speak on the record, citing a nondisclosure agreement they had signed with the company. Several that did speak to us asked that we not use their names or any identifying characteristics for fear of litigation.

One former employee agreed to answer questions via email but refused to answer any that might reveal their identity — like what their role was or how long they worked for the company. When asked why, they said, “The board members/majority shareholders of any leftover assets are known to be litigious.”

For simplicity’s sake, let’s call this source Pat. At first, Pat wrote in an email to Oregon Business the workplace at Lora DiCarlo was energetic, positive and inclusive. “Over time it became evident that there were some fractures between executives.”

In early spring of 2022, several staffers suspected that something strange was afoot when Haddock stopped attending meetings. “But we carried on with preparing for the holiday season since it wasn’t too unusual that she would disappear for weeks at a time,” Pat wrote. On Oct. 16, everyone — including HR and other C-level executives — got a text message from Haddock saying that everyone’s “termination was immediate,” according to Pat.

Pat says that they are still owed unpaid wages. BOLI reports that seven former Lora DiCarlo employees have made unpaid-wage claims.

“Our termination letters indicated that we would have COBRA options. However, we all later found our health insurance had not been paid, and we not only lost COBRA options but owed medical bills for the month of October as if we were uninsured,” Pat wrote, adding that through the collective work of all the laid-off employees, they were able to negotiate a deal with their insurance brokers. “We were on our own, but that wasn’t new.”

According to Pat, Layman left the company in October 2021, leaving a substantial amount of debt. Operational costs also suddenly swelled.

“We found that manufacturers and third-party logistics had been cutting us deals and giving us leeway due to the relationships that were built with the previous COO, logistics and operations teams,” Pat wrote via email. “These same parties, however, would decline meetings and refuse to continue to operate under similar agreements when the two women heading our company were requesting them.”

Even after cutting operational costs by 65% and running with a leaner budget, Pat says, the company was not able to handle the increase in shipping and logistics costs. “We needed a substantial influx of cash to move product to the states, pay off manufacturer debt and fund the launch of new product lines.”

The other woman heading the company, of course, was actress and model Cara Delevingne (with 42 million Instagram followers), whom Haddock brought onboard to be Lora DiCarlo’s new co-owner and creative adviser in November 2020, according to an article in Fast Company. Delevingne’s duties, according to the piece, included “raising brand recognition through content development and marketing strategies, as well as working with the in-house engineering team on product development.”

Delevingne’s entry was in theory, a master stroke. Pat says that the Cosmopolitan cover story on Delevingne’s sex toys that ran in July/August 2021 led to a spike in sales of Lora DiCarlo vibrators. Pat also says that Delevingne made a financial investment in the company in exchange for shares. (The company’s SEC filing shows that $2 million worth of shares were sold on Nov. 10, 2020, though it doesn’t divulge who they were sold to.)

The company also faced litigation from a German company called Novoluto, which makes the Womanizer. The two companies continued to file motions in the case through 2022, but on Nov. 15, Steven Lovett and Nathan Brunette at Stoel Rives filed a motion to withdraw as Uccellini’s legal counsel. They followed that with a December request to extend deadlines in the case, saying the reasons for the withdrawal could not be disclosed in the public record, but also that “counsel has not received the needed instructions from Defendant regarding positions it wishes to take on the substance of this case.” On Jan. 17, Judge Mustafa Kasubhai granted that motion and vacated all filing deadlines until the company finds new legal representation.

At press time, the company had not declared bankruptcy. The sex-toy review site Bedbible has published an article advising customers who haven’t received their product yet to keep an eye on bankruptcy filings and to file a proof of claim to get a refund.

 

Sexual-wellness sales and marketing agency Gisele International terminated its partnership with Lora DiCarlo on Oct. 17, 2022. “After weeks of being silent on us, canceling meetings and not responding to high-priority emails, we were left with no other options,” a member of the Gisele team said via email. They never heard back from the Lora DiCarlo team. A spokesperson for Gisele said they informed their partners directly about the company’s disappearance. “We shared with them the owner’s email address to allow them to reach out to the brand directly. To our knowledge, they were left without any answer. This is really a shame, especially for retailers, distributors and partners who strongly believed in the brand’s potential, who fought for it and who made the brand more visible globally.”

At the end of the day, Lora DiCarlo probably went belly up for the same reason most startups do. But a toxic workplace culture, negative reviews about the Osé and a lawsuit certainly didn’t help.

“I think they just ran out of money,” says Porter, the former director of engineering. “Do you know the success rate of startups? It’s a very small percentage that succeed.”

7 Green Tech Startups With the Innovations—and the Funding—to Help Save the Planet

From growing kelp forests to making packaging out of mushrooms, these companies are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from every angle. 

I wrote this round-up for Inc.'s Carbon Neutral package, in the May/June 2022 issue. 

Entrepreneurs coast to coast are coming up with innovative technologies showing not only that we can live without carbon-based energy, but also that we can thrive without it. From a Maine startup that's growing kelp forests (which can sequester gigatons of CO2 for centuries) to an electric vehicle company in Eugene, Oregon, that's making affordable electric cars with flair, these green tech startups show that our carbon-free future actually looks pretty cool. Wave energy? Batteries to store renewable energy that are more environmentally friendly than lithium? Biodegradable mushroom-based packaging? These aren't merely futuristic notions. They're happening now, and they've got the funding to prove it.

 

A Running Tide kelp microforest.

 

 Courtesy of Running Tide

 

 

 

An Acrimoto FUV.Courtesy of Acrimoto

Arcimoto

Tech: Builds right-size EVs for less than $20,000
Founder: Mark Frohnmayer
Home base: Eugene, Oregon

Not everyone needs--or wants--a Tesla. Arcimoto is on a mission to democratize electric vehicles. The startup, founded in 2007, makes a series of right-size EVs that are ideal for urban eco-drivers. The Fun Utility Vehicle (FUV), for example, is an open-air (yet covered) car with three wheels. Doors optional. It's ultra efficient and--unlike so many EVs--actually affordable. The company is growing, having just moved into a new 250,000-square-foot plant, a fivefold increase over its former digs. Next off the line will be a series of specialty vehicles, including the Rapid Responder, outfitted with sirens and lights for emergency services, and the Cameo, designed to create a smooth camera vehicle for the film and influencer industries.

Running Tide

Tech: Grows kelp to capture carbon
Founder: Marty Odlin
Home base: Portland, Maine

Like trees, kelp naturally fixes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere--only kelp does it exponentially faster than land-rooted trees and plants. So founder Marty Odlin decided to build a business selling carbon credits around this fact. Running Tide scientists amplify the process by growing the seaweed on wood buoys layered with ground-up seashells that sit on the ocean surface, allowing the plants to capture carbon via photosynthesis. The buoys themselves are made of carbon-rich wood, and when they get waterlogged over the course of several months they sink to the bottom of the ocean--carbon, kelp, and all--where they will sit for centuries. The potential is enormous: Some suggest kelp farms like these, if scaled in our oceans, could collectively sequester over 270 gigatons of carbon. Shopify, Stripe, which just launched a new $925 million carbon removal initiative, and Frontier (along with Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey) were early purchasers of Running Tide's carbon credits. Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital is also an investor. The first deployment of algae is happening in late summer 2022, off the coast of Iceland.

Rye Development's Swan Lake Energy Storage Project

Tech: Uses hydropower to store renewable energy
CEO: Paul Jacob
Home base: Boston

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are critical to our carbon-free future, but since it's not always windy and/or sunny, they require storage mechanisms to green the grid. When it opens in 2026, the Swan Lake energy storage project, based in Klamath County, Oregon, will be the first pumped storage hydropower project built in the U.S. in 30 years. The system uses excess renewable electricity from the grid to pump water to an elevated reservoir, where it sits as stored energy until it's needed. During peak demand, the water is released, spinning turbines that generate electricity. Swan Lake, which is being built by Boston-based Rye Development, will generate 400 megawatts of clean electricity, vastly increasing the storage capacity for the grid's wind and solar electricity.

ESS Energy Warehouse battery system.Courtesy of ESS

Energy Storage Systems

Tech: Builds a better battery
Founders: Julia Song and Craig Evans
Home base: Wilsonville, Oregon

 

These husband-and-wife founders started in their garage in 2011, cooking up so-called "flow" batteries, which store more energy and cost less per kilowatt-hour than lithium-ion cells. That's because they're made of environmentally benign materials: iron, salt, and water. A bonus: Iron batteries have a longer lifespan than lithium batteries--they can operate for 25 years or more with daily use versus lithium ion's 8 to 10 years. This kind of long-duration battery storage, which has been installed at San Diego Gas & Electric and other locations, will be crucial to reliably power a grid that relies on intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar.

 

AquaHarmonics

Tech: Tunes buoys to the waves to generate power
Founders: Alex Hagmuller and Max Ginsburg
Home base: West Linn, Oregon

Solar and wind energy will be essential for a carbon-neutral future, but the amount of time they produce energy is low. Solar produces energy just 25 percent of the time and wind produces energy 35 percent of the time. Wave energy, by contrast, has the potential to produce energy 60 percent of the time, and AquaHarmonics' founders believe they can increase that capacity to at least 80 percent. They will do this by using many smaller devices rather than a single large device as most other wave energy startups have done. Not only are small devices cheaper and easier to deploy, they can also generate more consistent power because they move out of phase with one another. For a variety of reasons, they can also survive storm conditions better than most bigger devices can, and continue to generate similar amounts of power. AquaHarmonics is designing cylindrical buoys with a mooring line that reels in and out with the waves. Depending on where they're deployed, the average capacity is 300 to 600 kilowatts, about the same as a big wind turbine. In 2017, the startup won the $1.5 million Wave Energy Prize and has since received $4.4 million in grants from the Department of Energy. It will soon deploy a device in Hawaii at a Navy Wave energy test site to demonstrate that the technology works. Grid-connected testing should follow in 2023.

 

Harvested air mycelium (left) and a faux leather jacket made from mycelium.Courtesy of Ecovative

Ecovative

Tech: Makes biodegradable packaging from mushrooms
Founders: Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre
Home base: Green Island, New York

Polystyrene foam, otherwise known as Styrofoam, is made from petroleum. But what if you could use a plant-based version that you could also break up into bits and throw in your garden, knowing it would become soil in a matter of months? That's the solution pioneered by Ecovative, with its 100 percent natural and biodegradable packaging material made from mushroom mycelium, the root structure of fungi. The company uses a patented growth chamber to guide mycelium into enormous sheets, and then forms it into everything from wine shippers to packaging for beauty brands like Ulta Beauty Retailing. Next up? Projects for the fashion industry including shoe insoles and mycelium leathers. The company, which has licensees in many countries, is ramping up production, with plans to open a 20,000-square-foot facility on the East Coast in August 2022.

Products made with Perfect Day animal-free milk protein.Courtesy of Perfect Day

Perfect Day

Tech: Makes faux milk that's nearly identical to the stuff from cows
Founders: Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi
Home base: Berkeley, California

Methane is 28 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2, and a single dairy cow generates about 220 pounds of the greenhouse gas per year. The founders of Perfect Day engineered a way around the climate-warming impacts of the 10 million-cow strong dairy industry in the lab. By introducing the genetic code for whey protein into a fungus, Trichoderma reesei, they get a whey protein that is molecularly identical to the whey protein in cow's milk. As such, it mimics the creamy mouthfeel of dairy, making it a viable substitute. The protein is already used in a handful of popular ice-cream brands including Midwest ice cream manufacturer Graeter's and the Keto-friendly line Nick's. The company also partners with General Mills on a cream cheese and Betterland and Starbucks on an alt milk that the coffee giant is still trying to name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Household Recycling Made Easier — For a Price

I wrote about Ridwell, the Seattle startup that's building a business around collecting all the old batteries, clamshell containers and lightbulbs that most recycling programs leave behind, for Bloomberg Businessweek.   

 

Jill Fransen considers herself a serious recycler, the kind of person who knows the difference between various plastics, takes care to sort them, and drives five miles from her home in Portland, Oregon’s, North Tabor neighborhood to drop off refuse at a recycling center.

Over nearly a dozen years, Fransen’s routine was pretty well established. Then in late 2020, she heard about Ridwell, a subscription-based recycling service that had just been introduced in Portland. For about $12 per month, Ridwell would pick up items — stuff that many recycling programs won’t accept, like certain plastics and spent lightbulbs — right from one’s front porch, and take everything to its local plant to sort and redistribute for recycling or re-use.

“I was skeptical at first because of the monthly charge,” says Fransen. But seeing Styrofoam and #1 PET plastics — for polyethylene terephthalate, most known as the plastic used to make clamshell and other food containers — on Ridwell’s collection list persuaded Fransen to give it a try. “You have no idea how much #1 PET plastic you use,” she says. (According to the Michigan-based consulting firm Resource Recycling Systems, just 9% of the 1.5 billion pounds of PET-made items circulating in the U.S. are recycled.) “And driving out to East Portland got to be a pain in the neck.”

Taylor Loewen, general manager of Ridwell’s Portland operations, sits atop plastic bales at the warehouse.

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

Fransen is among the nearly 300 early adopters of the service in Portland, where operations started in November 2020. Since then, the number of subscribers there has grown to 22,400. Ridwell launched and established itself first in Seattle before expanding to Portland, Bellingham, Washington, Denver, Minneapolis and Austin. The total subscribers collectively is about 60,000. The company is among a small group of environmental startups that are working to eliminate plastic packaging and create compostable plastics from mycelium, a mushroom root.

Ridwell’s growth has coincided with Americans’ redirecting much of their anxiety and restlessness over the pandemic into online shopping. That in turn has generated huge amounts of garbage. “So many people were getting stuff delivered from Amazon, Instacart, and takeout,” says Taylor Loewen, Ridwell’s Portland general manager. “People were stuck at home realizing: ‘There’s just so much packaging in my house!’”

The effort started well before the Covid pandemic. Generally, consumers don’t have many easy options for properly disposing of things like plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and clamshell containers. In January 2018, China banned the import of most plastic recyclables, leaving many U.S. cities without a place to send what they’d collected. Before then, processors in China had handled about half of the world’s recyclable waste. Greenpeace has estimated that more than 90% of the plastic ever produced has not been recycled. 

Ridwell founder and CEO Ryan Metzger at the company’s Seattle warehouse.

Photographer: Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg

Those types of items had accumulated in Ridwell founder Ryan Metzger’s basement in his Seattle home. One weekend in the fall of 2017, he and his then 6-year-old son Owen started to clear the house of the refuse. “Every weekend, Owen and I would pick a category — Styrofoam, batteries, lightbulbs — and we would find a local partner,” he explained — someplace willing to take the haul. Before long, Metzger, then a marketing consultant for startups, was also hauling neighbors’ expired batteries and lightbulbs to various drop-off centers and recycling facilities around Seattle, along with his own trash. He’d post messages to the  neighborhood message board Buy Nothing, sharing tips about how to get rid of stuff — “I found a place that takes Styrofoam!”

The project, initially dubbed “Owen’s List,” caught on quickly. By October 2018, with 99 customers, it was officially named Ridwell. Within a year, the subscriber list had grown to 2,400 in the greater Seattle area.

For a monthly fee of $12 to $16, depending on the length of commitment, a square white Ridwell box is collected every two weeks. The box comes with reusable cloth bags, one for each item category — batteries, lightbulbs, threads, plastic, and a rotating “featured category” which ranges from old printer cartridges to holiday lights. Metzger estimates that, as of February, over 4.6 million pounds of waste from just Seattle, Portland, and Denver have been diverted from landfills.

Finding local partners, a key piece in the project from the beginning, has helped the expansion. Metzger worked to connect with businesses and other organizations that might re-use or recycle some of the collected items. Today, Loewen, the Portland general manager, and other employees with similar roles in Ridwell’s various locations spend a good chunk of time connecting with nonprofits and organizations like Free Geek, a Portland area technology nonprofit that facilitates the reuse of small electronics. The partners and categories vary from city to city.

Ridwell offers Portlanders a way to recycle plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and plastic clamshell containers.

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

Four years in, the venture also has become a fuller recycling business in its own right. At Ridwell’s 10,000 square foot warehouse in northeast Portland, employees sort plastic bags and blue Amazon wrappers (recyclable) from manila padded envelopes (not recyclable). A baler is used to compress plastic film into compact bundles. Industrial-sized bins spill over with second-hand clothes which ultimately will be donated to the city’s Pioneer Wiping Cloth, one of several organizations Ridwell works with.

Ridwell’s work has drawn investor interest. Metzger says the company has received three rounds of funding, though he won’t disclose the amounts. The business, he adds, is largely customer-supported.

Dylan de Thomas is vice president for external affairs at The Recycling Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to improving recycling systems across the country. De Thomas, who is based in Portland, is a fan of Ridwell — with one caveat. “I think it’s a neat concept. For all the materials — minus one — it’s a convenience service,” he says, referring to PET thermoforms, which are not only not accepted by the city’s recycling program but aren’t taken by any of the free recycling centers in town, either.

An unanticipated development has been a clash with Portland trash haulers, particularly in Clackamas and Washington counties. There, the sanitation workers have protested that Ridwell is stepping on their toes, even though those municipalities don’t currently accept the items that Ridwell collects. (Portland doesn’t have a municipal sanitation department, so private companies are contracted to collect garbage.) Another big challenge has been logistics. “It’s a logistics business that is growing quickly,” Metzger says.

Employees collect and sort items from Ridwell members at the Ridwell warehouse in Portland, Oregon

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

The Recycling Partnership’s de Thomas says ideally, what Ridwell collects and helps to redistribute or recycle should be part of any municipal service. “I prefer recycling programs that serve all of the residents equally and equitably,” he says.

Metzger is working to address the imbalance, he says, and is aware that the service Ridwell offers is not something everybody can afford. To that end, the company launched a pilot project over the December holiday season: for every gift card sold, Ridwell contributed $10 towards a six-month community-supported membership, of which there are now 100. “We hope to make it a more regular and larger part of Ridwell,” Metzger says.

Education also is part of Metzger’s game plan. The company sends out regular emails explaining what items are and are not included in each category. For example, a link might take you to the Clamshells page , which specifies that #1 PET plastic includes everything from plastic egg cartons and deli containers to plastic cookie trays. Not included in the category? Plastic bottles, blister packaging for batteries or electronics and colored plastics. Photos on each page make it easy to determine what is and isn’t included.

Last October, Metzger launched a transparency page. The company already had been sharing the names of their local partners, but on the transparency page, they also post each category’s contamination rates (how much collected material can’t be recycled or reused because it’s too dirty). On the website, you’ll learn that plastic film is the company’s most popular category in all six cities and goes to Trex in Nevada, where it’s transformed into composite decking.  Also that batteries, which go to EcoLights, have the highest recycling rate: 100%. 

“Transparency is something that consumers are very interested in,” Metzger says.  “It reinforces the behavior they’re making and shows the impact that we can all have by recycling and reusing properly.”

The Nike Designers who Started an Online Cremation Service

I wrote about Solace, a Portland-based startup, for Bloomberg Businessweek. 

David Odusanya (L) and Keith Crawford (R) at the Solace offices in Portland, Oregon 

When Keith Crawford and David Odusanya started their cremation company in April 2019, there was no way they could anticipate that a worldwide pandemic would soon prove the urgency of their model.

As Covid-19 approaches the two-year mark, Solace Cremation has turned out to be a service for the modern age—a web-based business that offers a safe and remote experience while allowing customers to smoothly organize a loved one’s cremation. Based in Portland, Ore., with operations in Seattle and Southern California, Solace handles the entire process almost completely online.

Crawford and Odusanya, formerly brand designers at Nike, left the apparel giant in 2017 to form their own creative agency, Co-Lab.  A couple years later, after reflecting on the difficulties they both experienced upon losing a parent, they started to research the funeral business. 

Crawford’s father died in 2013 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, but he’d planned everything about his own funeral and paid for all of it in advance. Even so, the funeral director overseeing the arrangements tried to up-sell Crawford and his siblings on various products and services once their father was gone. “Why would we want to do anything different from what my dad had chosen?” Crawford asks. And why, he kept wondering, hadn’t anyone come up with a better experience, given how many Americans are dissatisfied with end-of-life rituals.

Odusanya’s mother passed away later that same year, in his hometown of Sheffield, England. Her wish was to be cremated.  “I couldn’t understand why we were paying $2,000 for a wooden casket,” he says.

They each came away from those experiences wondering how they might fully redesign the funeral home experience — “so creepy and gloomy,” says Crawford. Part of their research involved interviewing families who’d had reactions similar to Crawford’s. The process, they heard again and again, was antiquated and cold, leaving most people feeling it was all about money. The pair was also surprised to learn that the cremation rate surpasses the burial rate in this country and no one’s building new funeral homes. So they ditched their initial idea and focused on modernizing the experience of saying goodbye to a loved one.

The death-care industry is dominated by Service Corporation International, a conglomerate that owns mortuary chains such as Dignity Memorial, Neptune Society, and Funeraria Del Angel. The industry is notoriously opaque about pricing. Even in California, where funeral homes must list prices online, a loophole allows many to get out of that basic requirement. Most funeral homes won’t disclose rates until you’re sitting at a table with them with a big binder plopped down in front of you.

“If you’ve chosen direct cremation there is no need for all the funeral home visits, paperwork by hand, and in-person meetings,” Crawford says. “We removed that from the equation and—COVID aside—people are very happy about that. It gives them time to do other things—plan a memorial, grieve with their families.”

Funeral rates rise with various purchases: caskets, floral arrangements, even prayer cards. And the cost of cremation increases significantly when handled by a traditional funeral home—to an average of $2,550 in the U.S., according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Even when choosing cremation at a typical funeral home, the fees can pile up, says Malisa Riceci, Solace’s funeral director. “If you want ‘priority’ cremation, if you want a lock of hair, if your loved one is over a certain weight, even if you want a pacemaker removed—these all add up very quickly,” she says. Most people, still overcome by grief, wind up agreeing to extra costs because they don’t have the time or emotional energy to shop around or negotiate.

Solace adds no extra fees. Its $895 flat fee includes: picking up the body (of any size), removing a pacemaker, cremating within 48 hours, completing paperwork, and returning a loved one’s ashes in a simple cardboard box. The only extra cost is for the death certificate, as that varies depending on the state and the number of copies a family needs.

The Solace office in Portland, Oregon.   [Courtesy of Solace Cremation] 

 

“What they have done is brilliant and necessary,” says Michael Hebb, founder of Death Over Dinner, a nonprofit that organizes events where people talk about death. He met Crawford and Odusanya about five years ago at Endwell, an annual industry symposium. “For one, the clarity of the offer and the pricing.” he says. “It’s not hidden away in some part of a funeral home’s website.”

Liz Eddy is the 31-year-old founder of Lantern, a resource guide for end-of-life planning that also serves as a digital vault for documents. Eddy singles out the one-on-one care the Solace team takes with each customer—even as it’s done remotely. “You have to deeply connect and earn trust with the individual,” she says. “They allow for ease, but also the experience is warm and connected and run by people who really understand” customers’ needs.

Solace says its growth has been swift. Although it doesn’t disclose figures, it says revenue tripled from 2019 to 2020. The startup recently collaborated with the Good Mod, a Portland design company, and industrial designer Rob Bruce, also a former Nike employee, to create more permanent urns—a frequent customer request—from 3D printed clay. These are available for sale on a separate website for $195 and up.

“We want to provide services that families want,” Odusanya says, “vs. just trying to sell them anything.”

How These Founders Are Detoxifying the Denim Industry—and Saving the Planet

This story appeared in Inc.'s October, 2021 issue, as part of the Female Founders 100.

Most jeans manufacturers rely on petroleum-based dyes and pollutants. Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu are on a mission to revolutionize the industry with planet-friendly, microbe-based dyes.

Michelle Zhu (left) and Tammy Hsu run Huue, a startup developing sustainable textile dyes to replace the ecologically destructive colorants the fashion industry uses.

About 20 percent of the world's industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing. And the denim industry is the worst offender: Most mass-market denim brands rely on petroleum-based dyes and chemicals like formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. In 2019, that reality inspired Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu to start Huue, which they spun out of Hsu's grad school work at the University of California at Berkeley, where she developed dyes made from microbial secretions. Huue is working on the launch of its first dye, a natural-but-synthetic indigo. The company's eight scientists are also developing sustainable dyes and colorants to disrupt other parts of the fashion industry. --As told to Hannah Wallace

 

ZHU: My parents were entrepreneurs in the apparel industry. Their brand focused on urban streetwear in the late '90s and early 2000s, which was why denim was such a large focus. As a child, I would visit garment manufacturing facilities on summer trips to China and witness the pollution firsthand: particles in the air that workers had to guard against with facemasks, and foul-looking waterways around the factories. It made a lasting impression on me.

HSU: I came at it from studying science and biology. The lab I was in was very entrepreneurial—we were all thinking about how we could apply these solutions to real-world problems. I'm interested in fashion, clothes, and textiles. The more I read about it, the more I realized that this is a huge problem in the industry.

ZHU: Until the turn of the 20th century, indigo was made from plants. Natural indigo is not very cost effective or scalable, and its performance and color consistency doesn't fit industrial needs. Today, it is generally created via petrochemicals. Fossil fuels are used at the source of creation, but the industry also relies on toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde and benzene— which not only pollute the planet but are carcinogenic as well. That's the main challenge we're tackling.

HSU: We look at how the indigo plant makes the indigo dye molecule. Then we take that genetic information and instruct our microbes to make indigo the same way. We're growing these microbes, and they're programmed to secrete the indigo.

ZHU: Microbes are truly amazing—they multiply rapidly. We call them nature's most powerful manufacturers.

 

HSU: Six years ago, my professor at Berkeley had a grant, and a story was written about our project. When people learned we were working on sustainable indigo, brands started inquiring.

ZHU: We'd just hired our team of scientists and everyone was so excited to get to work last year. And then it was all shut down. Our milestones are lab-based, so not being able to go into the facility for three months created all sorts of uncertainty. Then there was the issue of when we could run productions and supply products. We were fortunate to win a female founders competition hosted by Microsoft's M12 fund, Mayfield, and Melinda Gates's Pivotal Ventures. That gave us an extra million dollars, which was a big help in the midst of Covid. Finally in July 2021, we brought the whole (vaccinated) team back into the lab full time.

HSU: We've made a lot of progress to scale up our production with a couple of facilities around the U.S. and to make our microbes more efficient. In August, we were producing 80 times more dye than at the end of last year. Our partners want huge amounts of dye.

ZHU: The fashion industry is aware of its challenges—its troubled supply chain and the toxic nature of the dyeing process. It hasn't been difficult to get people really excited about the technology and potential.

MilkRun Revives the Milkman Model for Farm Fresh Produce

 

I wrote this feature about Portland-based startup MilkRun for Businessweek's food issue. 

 

Julia Niiro on her farm in Canby, Oregon [CELESTE NOCHE FOR Bloomberg] 

When Julia Niiro founded MilkRun in Portland, Ore., in 2018, she wanted to combat two enduring challenges to local food systems: inefficient distribution and low farmer pay. Addressing these issues was necessary for smaller producers to disrupt an industry that’s “really, really good at processing cheap food and selling uniform waxed apples at the same place we go to buy our toilet paper,” as she put it in an impassioned 2019 TEDx Talk. But it’s much less successful at delivering the sustainably raised, flavorful food grown on nearby farms.

In America, efficiency and scale have superseded taste, nutrition, and the livelihood of the farmer who grows, raises, or otherwise produces our food. Producers get only 8¢ out of every dollar spent by consumers, on average.MilkRun’s mission is straightforward: “I want to make it as easy to buy from our local farmers as it is to book a stay in someone’s house or call a ride.”

The case for buying locally produced food is stronger than ever. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down Oregon and the rest of the country in mid-March, it both sped up the trend toward online grocery shopping and highlighted the shortcomings of the industrial food system. In just a few weeks, farmers, unable to sell to restaurants, school districts, and coffee shops, were dumping milk and plowing under onions. Not long after, 20 U.S. meat-processing plants were shuttered because of coronavirus outbreaks, leaving farmers to euthanize tens of thousands of pigs and chickens. By contrast, the small, nonindustrial supply chains of family-run ranches, dairies, mills, and produce farms were able to keep up with increased demand.

 

Continue reading on BusinessWeek's site. 

 

Who Does That? Tyler Malek

I've long been intrigued by people who have unconventional jobs. You know, the guy who makes robotic dinosaur models for museums, or the duo who composes the music for the Daily podcast. So it was fitting when my Inc. editors gave me a new column: Who Does That? 

My first subject, in the May/ June 2020 issue, is none other than Tyler Malek, the flavor whiz at Salt & Straw. (If you're not familiar with Salt & Straw, it's the Portland-based ice-cream company known for flavors like“Pots of Gold and Rainbows,” spiked with Lucky Charms, sea salt with caramel ribbons, and bone marrow with smoked cherries.)  

 

This ‘Carbon-Negative’ Burger Is Fighting Climate Change

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new online magazine. 

As fake meat floods the market, some fast-food joints are insisting that their ultra-sustainably raised beef is better for the planet.

Burgerville's No. 6 Burger uses regeneratively farmed grass-fed beef, wheat from farmers who plant cover crops and practice low-till agriculture, and cheese from a creamery in Southern Oregon that gets it milk from small, family-run farms.

 

Everyone from Miley Cyrus to Trevor Noah is raving about the Impossible Burger, the vegan beef with the trademark “bleed” that debuted in 2016. It’s one of a handful of plant-based meats that have surged in popularity on claims that they can “drastically reduce humanity’s destructive impact on the global environment,” as Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown has put it.

But what if there’s another, earth-friendlier option? What if a juice-dripping burger from an actual cow could be better for the planet than vegan-but-you’d-never-know-it imitation meat? A few burger chains are tacitly suggesting as much, offering real beef burgers that, by some measures, are more sustainable, and show how farming, done correctly, can be good for the earth.

Carbon-negative beef

Burgerville, a 60-year-old fast-food chain in the Pacific Northwest, launched the No. 6 Burger in September, so named for the sixth element in the periodic table, carbon. The No. 6 is a lesson in regenerative agriculture, a holistic land management practice that reverses climate change by rebuilding soil’s organic matter and restoring its biodiversity. 

The 100-percent grass-fed beef burger is from Carman Ranch, which practices rotational grazing on pasture, sequestering carbon back into the soil. (More on that later.) The brioche bun is baked at Grand Central Bakery from wheat grown on two Northwest farms (Small’s Family Farm and Camas Country Mill) that practice minimum tillage, which prevents erosion and carbon loss. And the aged cheddar melted atop is from Face Rock Creamery, which works with small-scale dairies within 15 miles of its facility. Every one of these enterprises is based in Oregon or Washington. The burger is currently sold at nine of Burgerville’s 41 locations. (It was slated to roll out at 16 additional locations in March, but then the coronavirus pandemic hit.) 

“Soil health is the core principle of what we do,” says Cory Carman, the 40-year-old owner of Carman Ranch. The pasture at Carman Ranch is rich with deeply rooted perennial grasses and nutrient-dense cover crops like winter pea, oats, sunflowers and a brassica mix—all plants that feed soil microbes as well as the cattle, eliminating the need for trucking in carbon-reliant feed like corn. The cattle are rotated on pasture and cycle the nutrients through their bodies, nourishing the soil with their manure, which in turn feeds the next cover crop. After they graze, that area is left fallow for as long as a year so it can regenerate. Crucially, the grasses and cover crops that the cattle munch on also pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. 

Though Carman doesn’t have funding to test how deep a carbon sink her grazeland is, other ranches that practice regenerative grazing have. White Oak Pastures, a Bluffton, Georgia-based farm, recently had an outside firm conduct a “Life Cycle Assessment” of its rotationally grazed beef. The results show that the operation produces a net total of negative-3.5 kilograms of carbon emissions for every kilogram of beef produced. In other words, the cattle of White Oak Pastures have a net-negative impact on the environment—the very process by which they’re raised reduces climate change.

A partnership, rare and well done

Back in 2017, before the No. 6 Burger was on their menu, a few Burgerville executives visited Carman on her family’s ranch in Wallowa County, Oregon. The company wanted to put its money where its values were—fostering a more resilient regional supply chain. But the executives were wary, in part, because of the premium price that Carman Ranch beef commands. 

Cory Carman on her ranch in Wallowa, Oregon. Credit: Steven Jackson / Flickr

Carman convinced them that supporting her ranch would help bring the operation to scale, allowing her to lower her prices —a virtuous cycle of its own. “I told them, ‘Listen, if you want us to scale up so we can become one of your suppliers eventually, you can’t just sit around!’” she recalls. The Burgerville execs agreed, and committed to making the ranch’s grass-fed beef about seven percent of the beef in all their burgers.

The partnership worked. Burgerville’s commitment to buying a steady weekly volume allowed Carman to scale up, doubling the ranch’s production from 20 head of cattle a week to 40. Today, the Carman Ranch beef Burgerville buys goes first to the No. 6 Burger, and if anything is leftover, they’ll use it in the grind for the regular burgers. (The chain uses Country Natural Beef, which is grass-fed and corn finished, for its other burgers.) And even though the coronavirus pandemic shuttered all Burgerville restaurants to dine-in customers (38 remain open for drive-through or delivery business), they’ve stuck by their weekly order from Carman Ranch. 

Despite its $8 price tag — several dollars more than Burgerville’s $5.39 Northwest Cheeseburger — the No. 6 has been a hit. “I thought there was going to be all this pushback on pricing, but there wasn’t,” says Michelle Battista, the chain’s senior vice president for brand and marketing. From September to April 5, Burgerville sold nearly 50,000 No. 6 Burgers, nearly 14 percent of the company’s quarter-pounder burger sales. 

Impossible in nature

The No. 6 Burger is a story of long-game sustainability, in which shared risk and commitment lead to scaled-up carbon-negative farming.

The Impossible Burger’s story is different. A Silicon Valley food-tech triumph, its genetically engineered soy-based “heme” compound (the part that makes it “bleed”) has won over even un-woke fast food chains like Burger King and White Castle. But as critics like Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, have pointed out, the company’s reliance on genetically modified soy is problematic in ways that have nothing to do with animal rights. 

GM soy is genetically engineered so that it can be sprayed with Bayer-Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. Not only has glyphosate use been linked to the decline in honeybee and monarch butterfly populations, it has been classified by the World Health Organization as a probable carcinogen. The company’s reliance on a monoculture crop — genetically modified soy — also perpetuates one of the worst aspects of the industrial food system. Growing one crop year in and year out degrades the soil and contributes to erosion — because there are no cover crops to keep the soil in place — and also requires chemical fertilizers and other fossil fuels to harvest and transport. According to the World Food LCA Database, soybeans have a footprint of two kilograms of carbon for every kilogram of beans produced.  

Rachel Konrad, the chief communications officer at Impossible Foods, says that the company routinely scans for pesticides and herbicides and that there is no glyphosate in the Impossible Burger (though she did not deny that glyphosate is used on GM soy crops). She also disputed that relying on soy would perpetuate a monocultural food system, saying, “Animal agriculture is the No. 1 reason we’ve developed dangerous, biodiversity-killing monocultures… For what it’s worth, if you want to avoid soy for some reason, then you must eliminate animal products from your diet since livestock consumes the vast majority of all soy.” This is entirely true of the cheap feedlot beef raised in America, which is what most fast-food chains depend on. However, it is not true of ranches, like Carman’s, that practice regenerative agriculture, since their cattle is grazed on only pasture; they never eat soy or corn.  

There is also the question of whether heme, made from fermenting a genetically engineered yeast, is safe to eat. Konrad cites conclusions from the U.S. FDA and third-party food safety scientists “that the heme in the Impossible Burger is totally safe to eat.” But organizations like the Center for Food Safety and Moms Across America argue that we don’t really know, since this is the first time humans have ever consumed this unique lab-made form of heme. 

But the biggest impact of these products may be how quickly they have shifted focus away from more sustainable methods of farming and toward tech-based solutions instead. Before fake meat made a splash, at least one fast-food chain had just begun committing to more sustainably raised beef. In 2015, Carl’s Jr. introduced an antibiotic-free burger sourced from free range, grass-fed cattle. It’s no longer on the menu — now the chain sells the Beyond Burger instead. 

While some regional chains like Elevation and Bareburger have continued to source grass-fed beef from smaller family-run farms, most are still sourcing their beef from confined animal feeding lots, which are devastating for the environment, horrific for the animals and not great for human health. (Cows evolved to eat grass, not corn, which tends to make them sick). This, at least, is something that Impossible CEO Brown and proponents of regenerative agriculture agree on: our addiction to cheap feedlot beef is harming the planet. 

Burgerville’s business has been crucial to Carman Ranch’s growth. But more important than revenue, the chain has given Cory Carman — and the other farmers behind the No. 6 burger — a chance to share her mission with the wider world. “We want to get the message out: Why should you pay a premium for grass-fed beef? Why is our species dependent on the health of the soil?” She, like other practitioners of regenerative agriculture, is concerned that lab-based meat perpetuates monocultures. “The integration of animals, in some way, is critical to all ecological systems,” she says.  

The benefits of regenerative agriculture are complex, but once customers are educated, says Battista, they’re on board. “As a marketplace, we got people to grass fed,” she says. “We got people to see the difference between grass-fed and conventional feedlot beef. And people are like, ‘Yeah, I get it!’ And they connect the dots back to their own health and wellness.” 

 

where2go without car2go?

My husband and I have been car-free for a decade, and one of the things that made this lifestyle possible was the existence of car2go, a car-share service that allowed us to pay by the minute and drop off the vehicle in any legal parking space in town. So, a week after the international climate strikes, I was upset to discover that car2go was leaving Portland (and 4 other North American cities). I wrote this op-ed in Portland Business Journal to express my discontent and take the pulse of other car-free Portlanders.  

Download Opinion_ In Portland where2go now_ - Portland Business Journal

Portland, the birthplace of car-sharing in the U.S., has always been a leader when it comes to transportation alternatives. The MAX debuted in 1986. CarSharing Portland launched in 1998, well before merging with Flexcar, later bought by Zipcar, in 2001.

So when car2go, one of our most popular car-sharing services, announced last month that it would cease operations in Portland, it felt like a slap in the face. The company’s e-mail to users — which came just one week after the Climate Strike rally — said Portland “is a complex transportation market that requires a significant investment on the part of any mobility provider wanting to enter the city and unfortunately, we are unable to continue doing so in a manner that’s sustainable for our business.” Car2go is also exiting its headquarters city of Austin as well as Calgary, Denver and Chicago.

Car-free Portlanders like Katherine Deumling, CEO of Cook with What you Have, are shocked and upset.

“We used it all the time. The system worked so well,” says Deumling, who with her husband and son went car-free in the fall 2012. “If Car2go had to raise its prices, I would’ve been fine with that. Don’t throw the whole thing away.”

Susan Towers, founder of Forerunner PR, adds, "It was such a sustainable solution. I was hoping they would add more cars, not remove the service altogether,” she says.

The former New Yorker had used Zipcar before arriving in Portland, but considered Car2go superior. “Car2go was a revelation,” Towers says. “I loved having the free-floating model and being able to park and walk away on one way trips.”

My husband and I were car-free for two years before Car2go debuted in Portland in 2012. It radically improved the quality of our lives. Unlike Zipcar, which you have to return to the same spot an hour or two later, Car2go allowed for one-way trips. It also made sense for short trips, especially if you were running late (which we always seem to be doing). We relied on it during Portland’s long rainy season, when biking didn’t look terribly appealing.

Car2go charged a reasonable by-the-minute fee and its original fleet of eco-friendly Smart Cars were easy to park. (And free to park, as long as you parked in designated city parking marked for 30 minutes or longer.) We used car2go for doctors appointments, lunch dates, family gatherings and get our daughter to far-away basketball practices. All for a fraction of the cost of a Lyft or Uber.

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. accounting for 29 percent in 2017. Light-duty vehicles like cars comprise the largest category within transportation.

Interestingly, according to data from Boston University’s Database of Road Transportation Emissions, Portland’s per person emissions have decreased by 22 percent since 1990. Certainly some of that decrease is due to the success of car-sharing programs like Car2go, Get Around, BMW’s ReachNow (which, joined with car2go last February to make ShareNow, in certain cities) and ZipCar.

It may be counterintuitive to argue that Car2go, with its latest fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles introduced throughout North America in 2017, helped mitigate climate change. But research conducted by Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley, shows that people who sell their vehicles and replace them with a carshare membership reduce their “vehicle miles traveled” by as much as 27 percent to 43 percent.

According to Car2go, Portland’s fleet as of October included 450 vehicles. There were 110,165 active Car2go users. If Car2go kept just a fraction of those 110,165 Portlanders from buying a car, then it certainly was a potent tool in our toolbox for reducing overall carbon emissions.

My husband and I won’t be caving in and buying a car. We’ll use this opportunity to embrace biking in the rain. We may even splurge on an electric bike for my husband’s commute to work. But many of the other 110,165 active Car2go users won’t have such tenacity. At a time when our climate is in crisis, Car2go’s decision to abandon Portland feels a bit like a betrayal.

High Drama: A Cannabis Biotech Company Roils Small Growers

Back in July, I reported on the Phylos Bioscience saga for Wired. 

 

When Mowgli Holmes and his childhood friend Nishan Karassik founded Phylos Bioscience in 2014 they had one major goal: to provide more transparency in the cannabis industry. That “and science, truth, consistency—and better weed,” Holmes wrote me in an email back in 2017.

They never could have guessed in 2014 that within a few years, they would be the subject of suspicion and outright contempt in some quarters of the tight-knit cannabis-growing world. But maybe they should have, because the transition from the illicit trade in marijuana to the mostly licit cannabis industry was never going to be without its complications and conflicts. Large science firms and Big Agriculture see an opportunity. Little cannabis sees a threat.

One of the first services Phylos launched was a “plant sex test,” which saves pot growers time and money by determining the sex of a seedling within a week of germination. (Only female cannabis plants contain usable amounts of THC, CBD, and other cannabinoids, so you want to cull the males ASAP.)

The company also began a collaboration with Rob DeSalle, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and professor at Columbia University, to sequence the DNA of as many cultivated varieties of cannabis (or cultivars) as possible to shed some light on the plant’s evolution. The results were published—on April 20, 2016, 4/20 naturally—in an open source forum called the Galaxy.

A splashy visual representation of the genetic relationships between cannabis varieties, the Galaxy is also, in essence, a road map for breeders. At first, the Phylos Galaxy was a kind of community science project—anyone who sent in tiny piece of stem (swabbed with alcohol to remove any traces of THC) got their cultivars genetically sequenced for free. (A fee was added later.)

But later in 2016, Phylos began offering a “plant genotype test,” which included a placement on the Galaxy as well as a full report on its relationship to other cultivars. Because the Galaxy is public, it allows any breeder, scientist, or curious pot consumer to see how their favorite cultivar fits into the big picture—and it also helps growers decide what to breed next. (The farther apart two plants are genetically, the more likely they are to yield a plant with higher vigor and more disease resistance.)

Genotyping also offers a quick fact-check, allowing growers to know if they’re mislabeling cultivars—which, due to the clandestine nature of the black market, happens with some regularity. From the beginning, Phylos positioned itself as a “new kind of agriculture company,” one that mistrusted Monsanto and championed small-scale growers and breeders, the people responsible for the vast genetic diversity in the cannabis category. At last count, the Phylos Galaxy had 3,000 samples from 80 different countries, making it the largest database of cannabis genetics in the world.

So when Holmes announced on April 16 via Instagram that Phylos would be launching its own breeding program in a facility west of Portland, it wasn’t all hearts and smiley faces. Many in the cannabis community were outraged. “How about staying in your lane,” said one early response. “Damn, maybe you really have been stealing genetics this entire time,” began another. And finally: “Every idiot that allowed your company to put their genetics into their system just lost all their intellectual property.”

At first glance, the haters’ comments might’ve been dismissed as paranoia, jealousy, or at the very least anti-science. After all, you can’t resurrect a cannabis plant from a dead stem and 2,000 sites on the genome, which was all Phylos was sequencing.

But a few days later, a video surfaced that showed Holmes pitching investors at the Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference in Miami in February. In it, Holmes tells a roomful of would-be investors that Phylos has a huge lead as a cannabis breeder. “We’ve been collecting data and IP for four years. We have really huge barriers to entry protecting us,” and that “we have more trust in the cannabis industry than any other science company.”

The real bombshell, though, was when Holmes introduced a few members of the Phylos advisory board, one of whom had worked for Syngenta for years, and another who was VP of technology acquisition at the merged Dow and DuPont. Holmes continued: “So, having these guys around is just critical for us, because we’re building a company that is ultimately going to be acquired by that universe.”

 

To breeders and growers who had often heard Phylos employees publicly disparage Monsanto, affiliation with Syngenta and Dow/DuPont sounded like a deal with the devil. Also the idea that Phylos would use its storehouse of genetic data—in some cases freely donated by small growers—to pump up its market value and attract a major industry buyer sounded like an underhanded double-cross.

It was too much for brothers Aaron and Nathan Howard, co-owners of Southern Oregon cannabis farm East Fork Cultivars, who had been working with Phylos on a high-CBD hemp breeding project since February as part of something called the Breeding Innovation Network. In late April, East Fork was still publicly defending Phylos—both on Instagram and in real life.

The Howards knew the company was about to launch a breeding program—it wasn’t a secret—and although they had believed in the company’s integrity and commitment to helping small family-run cannabis farms like theirs, they were growing increasingly worried that they had been misled. “For so long, Phylos had been talking about being a different kind of agriculture company,” says East Fork CEO Mason Walker. “It would be one thing to be under crazy financial pressure and eventually have to sell under duress, but to actually have that as an intentional strategy? That really changed my mind.” East Fork left the Breeding Innovation Network in early May.

The episode is emblematic of a larger trend unfolding in the still-nascent legal cannabis business: The science and technology of mainstream agriculture is about to revolutionize marijuana. But old-school, pre-legalization cannabis growers fear they’ll be snuffed out in the process.

Though cannabis remains federally illegal, 11 states plus the District of Columbia have legalized recreational adult use, and 33 states along with DC have legalized medical use. Overall, members of the legal cannabis industry view the prospect of federal legalization—which some expect to happen in five to 10 years—with a mixture of hope and trepidation.

Once cannabis is legal, Big Agriculture will be able to invest enormous sums into improving cannabis. Once that happens, it will become extremely difficult for longtime breeders and growers to compete. Other monied interests from Big Pharma and the alcohol beverage industries have already jumped in. (Look no further than liquor conglomerate Constellation Brands, which last year invested $4 billion in Canadian cannabis firm Canopy Growth.)

To keep reading more, go to Wired. 

 

An Interview with Winemaker Barnaby Tuttle

 

I interviewed Portland winemaker and raconteur Barnaby Tuttle for the British wine magazine Club Oenologique.

Tuttle during harvest time

 

Drop into Barnaby Tuttle’s southeast Portland winery, and chances are he’ll be tending bar wearing a baseball cap and rocking out to Miles Davis’s psychedelic Bitches Brew.

Tuttle, who runs Teutonic Wine Company with his wife Olga, is one of Oregon’s most interesting winemakers. Though his favourite grape is Riesling—and he makes some truly excellent Rieslings—he also makes Pinot Noir, a Pinot-Gamay blend, a Tannat, and a Pinot Noir, Tannat and Gewürztraminer blend he calls Red Fang, named in honor of a Portland heavy metal band.

Unafraid to challenge conventional wine orthodoxy, Tuttle has made wine from grapes that were kissed with smoke from the 2017 Gorge fires (he called this Rauchwein), and a medium-dry Riesling from grapes that had 100% botrytis (called Candied Mushroom). He’s even made several wines inspired by scenes in This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner and Christopher Guest’s hilarious mockumentary about a metal band.

Portland’s Nostrana wine buyer Austin Bridges is a big fan of Tuttle and his wines – particularly his Rieslings: “they are so unique and different, so powerful and deep,” he says. “But they are also very drinkable and good food wines. They’re top notch Rieslings.” Right now, he has Teutonic’s 1908 Riesling on the menu (made in a dry style, as it was in the early 20th century in the Mosel Valley), and he’s bringing on the Candied Mushroom soon. The Teutonic wines are also found in restaurants like California’s Chez Panisse and Atelier Crenn, as well as New York’s Gramercy Tavern and Eleven Madison Park.

Teutonic Wine Company Rieslings

It shouldn’t surprise you that Tuttle had an unorthodox path to becoming a winemaker. Before discovering wine in 2000, he was an ironworker and worked in a wrecking yard. Wanting to save up for a trip to New Zealand, he got a job waiting tables at Papa Haydn, an upscale restaurant/cake shop in Portland, Oregon. “It was a lot more money than at the wrecking yard,” says Tuttle, now 51.

One day, the manager took him aside and said he’d need to take a wine class if he wanted to keep his job. Tuttle, who grew up working class in North Portland, showed up to the class in his Plymouth Barracuda. “I didn’t belong,” he says. But it was at one of these classes, taught at Great Wine Buys, that Tuttle had an epiphany that would change the trajectory of his life. He had always dismissed silent tastings as “pretentious nonsense,” but was amazed when they yielded similar tasting notes from 80% of his classmates.

The moment that really blew his mind, though, was when the instructor organised a side-by-side tasting of three Oregon Pinot Noirs, all from the same producer but from three different vineyard sites in the Willamette Valley. Even though he was just beginning to train his palate, Tuttle could taste differences between the three wines. “The instructor said, ‘That’s this thing called terroir.’”

The concept of terroir—which Tuttle says was “the coolest thing I’d ever been told”—changed everything. He began devoting himself to tasting wines from around the world. A year later, in 2001, he was promoted to wine buyer at Papa Hadyn. In 2005, he and Olga bought a vineyard in Alsea, Oregon (about 20 miles from the coast), and Tuttle started making his own Riesling.

You have a particular interest in German-style wines. How did you come to grow and make Riesling?
When I was the buyer at Papa Hadyn, I needed some Mosel wine and I heard about this guy Ewald Moseler. He brought in 14 Mosel Rieslings, and I bought everything in the bag and said to Olga, “I’m gonna have to figure out how to do that.” It scared the shit out of her because she knows I follow through on crazy shit. I planted a vineyard a short time later, in 2005. That was the Alsea vineyard.

What was it about those wines that excited you so much?

I had already been into cool-climate wines. Dirty, natty are fashionable now – but those wines took it to the next level. Their acid was off the hook, they pair with food really well, and they last a long time. I used to buy a 1979 Riesling from Moseler for $19.

Did people like German Rieslings at Papa Hadyn?
Not always, but it was like helping an old lady cross the street. It doesn’t make any money, but it’s the right thing to do. I loved selling it and it’s fun, but it isn’t the easiest path.

I think people are apprehensive about sweet wines. I call it sugar shame. They think, “You’re an idiot, why are you drinking sweet stuff?” You have to tell them, “No, it tastes good to me.” 

Riesling is confusing because a lot of the high-tone aromatics add to the perception of sweetness and if it smells fruity, people think it’s sweet. It may have 12 grams of acid and a tiny bit of sugar. There’s this Chardonnay: Rombauer. It probably has 14-15 grams of sugar and 5 grams of acid, so the sugar profile is way sweeter, but when people taste it in a buttery Chardonnay they don’t taste the sugar. You have to educate people in a way that’s super respectful to them. The people who I want to educate the most are people like me, who didn’t grow up with privilege.

One more thing about Moseler – I got to be super good friends with him. He took me to Germany in 2007 to meet all these Riesling producers, and one of them became my mentor: Harald Junglen of Weingut Ackermann. I have so many friends over there—I call them the Mosel Mafia. I’m this crazy American with a passion for Riesling. When I’m there, I’ll wake up in the morning and start working with whomever I can.

Tell me about one of your early failures and what you learned from it.

There are so many. When we planted the vineyard at Alsea, I was a purist. This revolution in wine hadn’t happened yet. There were a lot of good Oregon wines – Eyrie, Cristom, Cameron – but there were also all these Pinots that had to chase this Parker profile that was more like Syrah than Pinot Noir. There was that expectation of dark red or purple. A lot of these guys were using enzymes and new oak or oak chips. Some of those wines are probably objectively really good, but I don’t need the sales rep to pour me 15 wines that taste like the same thing.

A lot of the institutionalized things people were telling me, I was rejecting. In France and Germany, you’re not allowed to irrigate your vines—just a little bit of water the first year. I liked these wines so much more. So I planted Alsea, and I said, “I’m not gonna irrigate. Bugger off!”

But they were right. Being very provincial growing up on the west coast and never spending a summer anywhere else, I thought that the dry summers we get here were like everywhere else in the world. Luckily the farmer next to me ran some sprinklers through and saved my vineyard.

I irrigated the first year and let it ride after that—no more irrigation.

Did you have a lack of money at first? Have you had any outside investment?

Oh, fuck. We had no money. We still have no money. I mean, everybody says they have no money and then the check comes after dinner, and it’s $300 per person so you have to cough it up. I’m like the Top Ramen queen. I know how to make things stretch.

After I left Papa Hadyn, I got hired on at Laurel Ridge Winery in Carlton and was promoted to assistant winemaker. I was mechanically inclined. I started fixing all the machines, dialing in the bottling line. Susan Teppola [the owner] let me make my wine there as a privilege. Then I outgrew the space. We got a tiny bit of family help and stripped every nickel out of our house. I could make more money waiting tables, but I wouldn’t get to have this quality of life.

You’ve done some interesting wine experiments. Tell me about the most successful ones.

The Candied Mushroom is my favourite thing in the world. We’ve been able to do it two years in a row—I was fortunate enough to have 100% botrytis twice. It may not happen again. I’m at the mercy of nature. I mean for dessert wines, it’s a desirable thing, but I’m finding that a lot of the things people are taught to believe are not always true.

Last year, you sent a couple of your wines in to a cannabis testing lab to see if they contained terpenes [the aromatic components in plants that give them their particular aroma and, in the case of cannabis, contribute to the type of high you experience.] Why did you do this?

I don’t like to speak in absolutes, and I kept telling people that this wine shares things with cannabis. I knew it was true, but I just wanted to have it on paper. I think it was the Muscat that came back, and it had the same profile as Lemon Sour Diesel.

Is that a strain you particularly like?
It’s an okay strain. I like heady, cerebral stuff. I don’t like to go numb, I like to be tripped out.

What are your favourite wines around the world?

I like most wines. I typically don’t like Sauvignon Blanc, but once in a while I’ll have it and love it. Olga and I recently had a Sauv Blanc from our friends at Division Wine (in Portland) and we looked at each other and said, “I hate Sauv Blanc, but I love this!”

Pinot Noir I love. Chenin Blanc from the Loire (but also from Tom Monroe and Kate Norris’s Division and Jeff Fischer’s Habit Wine). Nebbiolo, Valtellina stuff. It’s the region right up against Switzerland. They have a distinct strain of Nebbiolo called Chiavennasca, and it’s kind of like Barolo but with the finesse of Burgundy. A super mineral, Alpine wine.

Your winery doubles as a jazz club. How does your interest in jazz inform your winemaking?

Smoking weed and listening to jazz is probably the impetus for the Candied Mushroom. But it’s just like anything else: it’s music that takes you out of your safe space. Something that challenges you. I’m one of those people who when he gets curious about something he chases it really hard. 

Do you listen to jazz when you make wine?

A lot. We’ll put Slayer on and country, too. But a lot of psychedelic jazz. I didn’t listen to jazz before the winery. We kept making it sound better and better.

I hadn’t smoked pot in 25 years, and then Olga and I had these big dinner parties, and I’m like “Wait! No one is on their phones, on their computers! This is probably what it was like for my parents in the ’70s. Sitting around the sound system, eating, smoking, drinking.” In that context, it was like “Wow, I get it now. I need to know everything about this music.” I just threw myself out there and started meeting jazz musicians.

How often can people hear jazz at Teutonic now?

Three times a week: Wednesday and Friday nights, and then we have jam sessions on Sunday. There is a word in jazz: motherfucker. It’s the highest compliment: when someone in jazz thinks someone is a very skilled musician. Miles Davis started it. So Wednesday night is for the motherfuckers, and Friday nights are for the younger guys. It’s more of a hip-hop party vibe sometimes. It’s all up-and-coming—people who are taking lessons from older people. Then a jam session on Sunday at 4PM.

Heath Ceramics, Back from the Brink

This story on the evolution of Heath Ceramics appears in the July/August issue of Inc.

 

Mention Heath Ceramics to design nerds or high-end restaurateurs, and chances are they'll fawn endlessly over its retro, midcentury tile or brightly glazed stoneware. Heath devotees are nothing new: Since visionary ceramicist Edith Heath and her husband started the company in 1948, enthusiasts have included architect Frank Lloyd Wright and chef Alice Waters.

Yet the company likely wouldn't be around today were it not for Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic. When the couple--designers prowling about for a new project--stumbled into Heath's Sausalito, California, showroom in 2003, the company was struggling, unable to cover its bills and pay all of its employees. At the time, Edith was in her early 90s, with failing health and no succession plan. Forget diversification or modern­ization--a lone typewriter was still being used in the office.

After discovering that Heath was for sale, the couple immediately wrote the company a letter. Three months later, the now-70-year-old business was theirs. "The whole process was simpler than buying a house," Bailey says.

 

Over the past 16 years, Bailey and Petravic have brought Heath back from the brink by evolving everything from its product lines to its ownership structure, striking a delicate balance between respecting die-hard fans and bringing new ones on board. They've shifted the business from wholesale to direct-to-consumer, built a San Francisco experiential destination, expanded into the bridal registry business, and forged creative collaborations with everyone from fashion designers to furniture makers.

 

"We don't want to be forced to do things we don't want to do."

But perhaps the couple's biggest impact, says Bailey, will come from employing a "slow business" approach to growth that enables the company to go all in on creativity, quality, and transparency. Since Bailey and Petravic took over, Heath has steadily grown from 25 employees to 246 and from $1.2 million in sales to $30 million, putting it on track to be debt free by the end of 2020. Earlier this year, they even converted 8 percent of the company to an ESOP, with the goal of increasing that to 25 percent. Says Petravic, with the stark contrast of San Francisco's tech scene bustling around him, "We're setting things up for the next generation."

KELSEY MCCLELLAN

 

Since Petravic and Bailey took over Heath Ceramics in 2003, they've continued working with some of the country's best restaurants, creating dinnerware lines with two of them: Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in 2006, and, in 2016, Tartine, whose outpost at Heath's Mission District location inspired a bright new glaze--Tartine Teal (above). The collection features Heath's signature rim, and extends the company's 70-year tradition of sourcing clay from Lincoln, California. 

 

KELSEY MCCLELLAN

 

Founder Edith Heath began manufacturing tiles in the early 1970s at this Sausalito factory, but the new owners "wanted to be where our customers are," says Petravic. In 2012, they moved the tile factory to a 60,000-square-foot former commercial laundry in San Francisco's Mission District--keeping dinnerware production in Sausalito--and also opened a second showroom and the Heath Clay Studio.

 

A tilemaker working the Ram press, a machine that uses hydraulics to press clay tiles into different shapes, like this retro design created by designer Leon Galetto in the 1950s. Today, tiles are 29 percent of Heath's business, while ceramics account for 55 percent and home goods--ranging from wallpaper to furniture--make up 16 percent.

 

 

Petravic, Heath's managing director, and Bailey, its creative director, standing in front of Heath's iconic, color-saturated tiles. The couple--designers with a 14-year-old son--didn't want to fall into the trap of increasing volume to meet demand, which often sacrifices quality. Instead, at maximum capacity at both factories, they took Heath in the opposite direction: creating limited-release lines sold only in the showrooms that channel the experimen­tation and playfulness of founder Edith Heath. "It's the heart and soul of where we come from," says Petravic.

 

Bailey is always looking for interesting collaborations, like the ones Heath has with Alabama fashion designer Natalie Chanin and with Finnish furniture maker Artek. Pairing her designers with artists who inspire them, says Bailey, allows them to create more interesting designs than they would on their own. It's also expanded Heath into new categories, like textiles (including tote bags and cloth napkins) manufactured in Heath Sews, and flatware, which Heath produced in partnership with the last remaining flatware maker in the U.S., Sherrill Manufacturing.

 

KELSEY MCCLELLAN

At Heath's Mission tile factory (left), a small army of kiln posts are stacked on a table, where the public can view them on one of the company's many tours. The showroom there is also a bustling hub of small-scale bakers, makers, and craftspeople. In addition to Tartine, there's a Japanese pop-up boutique, a printer's shop, a jewelry studio, and the Heath Newsstand, run by Ema Iwata (right). Launched in 2017, the newsstand--which offers 400 magazines from around the world--is an extension of Bailey and Petravic's deep interest in human-scale, tactile experiences. "We want to encourage a richness of face-to-face interaction," says Petravic.

Miami's Sizzling Startup Scene

I wrote a Destination guide to Miami's startup scene for the July/August issue of Inc. 

 

A vibrant immigrant entrepreneurial scene and a dash of the good life make Inc.'s No. 13 Surge City a hotbed for creativity.

Wet labs for biomedical startups, an emerging "elder-tech" scene, and a pipeline to Latin America are just a few of the reasons Miami is heating up as a destination for founders. If you have 24 hours in this Art Deco metropolis, here are the insiders to meet, up and coming neighborhoods to check out, and some insider tips on where to grab that watermelon cucumber margarita.

Startup Neighborhoods

Just eight miles from South Beach, office-tower-and-luxury-condo-plush Brickell is a financial hub-turned-startup magnet. "It's a little New York City," says Andrew Parker, CEO of elder-tech startup Papa, whose offices are headquartered in the neighborhood's WeWork.

 

Vibrant Wynwood marks the inter­section of Miami's arts community and its tech scene. Galleries, cafés, craft breweries, and restaurants sit alongside coding boot camp Wyncode, Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) Miami, and co-working space Lab Miami.

With upgraded transportation options and the city's best new restaurants—NIU Kitchen, Alloy Bistro, and Soya & Pomodoro—Downtown has become a new draw for young companies. Start­ups including software firm Octopi are now sharing the area with cultural institutions like the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

 

Red Flag

You can land seed and Series A funding here, but it can be hard to find growth-stage investors in South Florida, says Rebecca Danta, managing director at Miami Angels. And according to Brian Breslin, founder of tech entrepreneurship nonprofit Refresh Miami, one of the biggest challenges is finding and retaining talent: "A lot of our top-tier people leave and go to San Francisco because they can earn a much larger salary or because they want to put Facebook or Google on their résumé and build their pedigree."

Where to Talk Shop

One of the first third-wave coffee shops and roasters to open in Miami, Panther Coffee flaunts single-origin pour-overs, coffee cuppings, and founders and investors getting their caffeine fix in all of its five locations. Insider tip: Its Wynwood café is the buzziest.

 

Miami by the Numbers

$39.76 average direct leasing rate, per square foot, for office space in Miami-Dade County.

Source: CBRE MarketView Miami Office First Quarter 2019 report

The No. 1 U.S. metro area in percentage of immigrant entrepreneurs as of 2017.

Source: 2017 Kauffman Foundation Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs

40% growth for jobs in Miami-Dade County's tech sector from 2012 to 2018.

Source: Miami-Dade Beacon Council

Why bother working in Miami if you're not poolside at an Art Deco hotel with a watermelon cucumber margarita? Soho Beach House, the Miami Beach outpost of the London-based Soho House, is limited to members, their guests, and hotel guests, but you can pretend you're an insider at Cecconi's, the Italian courtyard-style restaurant on its ground floor.

The Players

The powerhouse duo behind Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) Miami and non-profit partner Venture Café Miami are Natalia Martinez-Kalinina and Leigh-Ann Buchanan. Buchanan, among other things, runs Venture Café's weekly gatherings for entrepreneurs and investors over an open bar and can't-miss programming. Martinez-Kalinina oversees CIC Miami, a co-working space for startups--including South Florida's only shared wet lab for biomedical startups--and runs its Latin American engagement program, which has agreements in five countries to bring investments to the city.

Felecia Hatcher is not only co-founder of Blacktech Week, an annual weeklong conference for minority tech entrepreneurs, and coding camp nonprofit Code Fever. She also runs A Space Called Tribe, a co-working space and urban innovation lab that serves black entrepreneurs in the Overtown neighborhood. Its venture-capitalist-in-residence program gives black entrepreneurs unprecedented access to VCs.

Companies to Watch

Papa provides seniors with "grandkids on demand"--vetted college students mostly in health care-related fields--to run errands or just hang out. Andrew Parker launched the app in 2018 and plans to expand beyond Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in early 2020.

 

Boatsetter co-founders Jaclyn Baumgarten and Andrew Sturner were Endeavor Miami Entrepreneurs of the Year in the tech category for their peer-to-peer boat-sharing platform, which operates in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and even the Andaman Sea near Thailand's Phuket Island.

In 2017, Olivia Ramos founded Deepblocks, which aims to master the art of closing a real estate development deal. Using A.I. and machine learning, it provides real-time analysis of financial and market data in combination with local building codes.

FRANZISKA BARCZYK

Recent Exits

Weston-based HR and payroll software firm Ultimate Software to a private equity group led by Hellman & Friedman, for $11 billion (2019).

Plantation-based construction software maker e-Builder to Trimble, for $500 million (2018).

Fort Lauderdale-based pet products provider Chewy to PetSmart, for $3.35 billion (2017).

Talent Pipeline

A digital and physical hub for the local tech scene, Refresh Miami hosts workshops and speakers for founders all over town. It's also a clearinghouse for jobs, startup news, and events--from Women in Miami Tech drinks to a Rise of the Rest pitch competition.

Founded by husband-and-wife team Johanna and Juha Mikkola in 2014, Wyncode was the area's first coding boot camp. It now has more than 700 grads--many with no previous computer-science background--who are working in over 300 tech companies, including local players like CareCloud, Magic Leap, and MDLive.

 

The first U.S. outpost of the global nonprofit accelerator-alternative, Endeavor Miami doesn't take equity and focuses on "scale-ups"--companies with the demonstrated business traction to deliver exponential growth--like edtech firm Nearpod.

Destination: Denver

I wrote an insider's guide to Denver's start-up scene for the March/April issue of Inc.   See here for the online version. 

Many are drawn to Denver--Inc.'s No. 8 Surge City--for its laid-back, weed-friendly culture, which certainly doesn't stop with its plethora of cannabis startups. Here's everything you need to know about the city's entrepreneurial scene, from which investors to meet with to where to do Bend and Blaze yoga.

Hot Deal Spots

Entrepreneurs and investors take meetings at Denver Central Market, a warehouse-turned-gourmet food hall in the heart of the River North (RiNo) district, which flaunts a creamery, a butcher, a bakery, a fish­monger, and a wood-fired pizzeria. "It's slammed," says Tom Higley of early-stage accelerator 10.10.10, "but you can always find a seat." 

The Commons on Champa, formed by a public-private partnership four years ago, is a hub for early-stage startups that provides free co-working space, with the option to rent out conference rooms and event space. 

Cultivated Synergy is where cannapreneurs congregate. This lively co-working space in the RiNo district has communal work­spaces, five private offices--occupants include a concentrates company and a payroll firm--and Bend and Blaze yoga. At night, it transforms into an event venue where even non­members can attend everything from beer tastings and bat mitzvahs to budtender-appreciation parties. 

 

Neighborhoods

Tech execs and employees tend to work and live in bustling LoDo (Lower Downtown), given its proximity to co-working spaces CTRL Collective and two WeWorks, Facebook and Slack outposts, the commuter rail to the airport--and Kimbal Musk's restaurant, the Kitchen.

The RiNo Art District, formerly a manufacturing neighborhood, is home to design studios, architecture firms, art galleries, and startups, like online interior-design marketplace Havenly.

CBD (no, not that--the Central Business District) was once a neighborhood just for finance and energy stalwarts. Today, startups including Geospiza, Nanno, and Salt have colonized the area.

STATS 

$27.02

Average cost per square foot of office space for the Denver metro area.

Source: The Downtown Denver Partnership

45

Number of co-working spaces in central Denver.

Source: The Downtown Denver Partnership

216

cannabis dispensaries and 272 indoor-grow locations reside in Denver.

Source: Excise and Licenses, City and County of Denver

 

Red Flags 

The city has yet to see a unicorn. "We'll get seed and Series A funding, but then usually have to raise capital from the coasts," says Paul Foley, managing director at SmartCapital. When it comes to VC capital, Foley estimates that New York City gets 20 percent, Northern California gets 40 percent, and Denver gets a meager 0.6 percent. "So companies here exit earlier," he says. "You get faster, smaller exits."

 

The Players 

 

Chris Onan, a co-founder of Galvanize, a Denver-based national coding school, is a strategy consultant-turned-venture capitalist who has invested in more than 200 companies. Onan can typically be found linking startups in the Denver-Boulder tech scene with talent or capital. "He's a super­connector," says Erik Mitisek, co-founder of Denver Startup Week. "He's our VC prince of the city."

Jenna Walker.CREDIT: Laura Murray

 

Jenna Walker was a professional photographer before co-founding online photo book Artifact Uprising. She sold her Denver-based company to VSCO in 2014, and recently became entrepreneur-in-residence of Techstars Sustainability in Partnership with the Nature Conservancy, which backs 10 entrepreneurs per year, like those behind Node, a Seattle-based company that makes eco prefab homes. 

Erik Mitisek.CREDIT: Courtesy subject

Erik Mitisek, the chief innovation officer for Colorado governor John Hickenlooper and former CEO of the Colorado Technology Association, is indispensable when it comes to startups in this town. He co-founded Denver Startup Week, launched the Commons on Champa and the online booking agent Next Great Place, and is now president of financial software company IMAgine Analytics.

 

Brands to Watch 

Jaclyn Fu and Lia Winograd launched Pepper, maker of bras for small-chested women, in 2017. "Most bra companies design for a single standard size: 36C," and then scale it up or down, says Fu. Pepper fixes the "cup gap." 

If you're still searching for your ideal cannabis, order a genetic test from Green Genomix. The early-stage company, founded by Jackson Rowland, will send a DNA collection kit to analyze genetics like CB1 receptors, and then provide a report revealing which strain, consumption method, and ratio of CBD to THC is best for you. 

Amy Baglan was on OkCupid and Match, but "it was such a sad experience," she says. An avid yogi with a regular meditation practice, in 2015 she launched MeetMindful, a dating app for the mindful-living crowd. 

Founded by Bryan Leach in 2012, Ibotta makes a shopping app that allows people to earn cash back on everyday purchases. It's one of the largest consumer tech companies in Denver, with 500 employees. 

CREDIT: Aaron Meshon

 

Talent Pipeline

University of Denver's Project X-ITE runs an entrepreneurship workshop series, an incubator, and an accelerator that has produced startups including Boobi Butter, which makes breast-care products and encourages women to get regular breast exams.

Accelerator and venture fund Canopy­Boulder has invested in a slew of cannabis-related companies, including digital signage outfit GreenScreens and Würk, a payroll company. 

Early-stage accelerator 10.10.10 invites 10 successful serial entrepreneurs to Denver to solve one of 10 "wicked problems" in 10 days. Graduates include Spout, maker of a device that can be used with a smartphone to analyze the levels of lead and other contaminants in a drop of water.

 

Recent Big Exits 

$2 billion SendGrid, to Twilio (2018)

$1.68 billion ViaWest, to Peak 10 (2017)

$230 million Craftsy, to NBC Universal (2017)

 

Recently Funded Startups 

Welltok, a health care software company, raised $75 million in 2018, bringing its total funding to a reported $251.7 million.

CyberGRX, a cyber-risk platform company, raised $30 million in 2018.

Galvanize, one of the largest coding schools in the United States, raised $32 million in 2018­--bringing its total funding to more than $167 million--and then acquired San Francisco-based Hack Reactor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Green Zebra: the Healthy Convenience Store

Lisa Sedlar, founder and CEO of Green Zebra, an Oregon-based healthy convenience store chain 

 

I wrote about Green Zebra for Inc.

 

Green Zebra is the anti-7-Eleven.

The healthy corner-store chain, which is known for grab-and-go salads and kombucha slurpees on tap, is based in Portland, Oregon, and now has three outlets. It's also a rising star in the convenience store market, which in 2018 accounted for $138 billion in U.S. sales, according to research firm Nielsen. However, the company's founder says its good food aspirations extend far beyond dominating the local-foods-obsessed Pacific Northwest.

"In the future, I hope that every urban neighborhood has a Green Zebra," says founder and CEO Lisa Sedlar. "Oftentimes, a neighborhood only has a traditional convenience store and there's no quality food to be had."

 

Six-year-old Green Zebra--named after an heirloom tomato that was bred in the Northwest--has a noble mission: make healthy food convenient and accessible for all. Sedlar came up with the concept--an inspired hybrid of Whole Foods and 7-Eleven--when she lived in Boulder and worked as a sales and marketing executive at a pharmacy and wellness company. From her office, which abutted the University of Colorado campus, she'd watch dumbfounded as college students returned from bike rides in the Rockies only to grab junk food at the local mini-mart.

She wondered why no one was making healthy snacks convenient to access, but she kept that thought in the back of her mind because in 2005 she was recruited to be the president of Portland-based grocery store chain New Seasons.

Then, in 2013, she made her move--opening her first Green Zebra in the North Portland neighborhood of Kenton. Since then, two others shops have opened: one in the Lloyd District and one at Portland State University. (A fourth opens in Southeast Portland in mid-2019.) 

DANIEL CRONIN

 

As at 7-Eleven, snacks are within reach but instead of sugary slurpees and hot dogs, you'll find superfoods like broccoli salad with kale, dried cranberries, cabbage, walnuts, chia seeds and ground turmeric, and chimichurri freekeh, an ancient grain that topples even quinoa in the protein and fiber categories. It's all made from scratch with local ingredients, of course. Each 5,000-square-foot store is also stocked with organic produce, a curated beer and wine selection, and regionally-sourced meats, milk, and cheeses.

Naturally, costs are higher at Green Zebra than at other corner-store chains, but Sedlar is attempting to tame them. The company partners with local farmers and brands to try to keep prices affordable--and it offers a 10 percent discount to SNAP recipients, 10 percent off for seniors every Tuesday, and 10 percent off for students every Wednesday. Ideally, the goal is to open in "food deserts," which are neighborhoods that are short on grocery stores. 

Adam Haber, an avid startup investor based in East Hills, New York, came across Green Zebra on equity crowdfunding platform CircleUp. He met with Sedlar and admired her zeal for healthy food and walkable communities; then he visited the Kenton store as a mystery shopper. "The employees are engaging and believe in the mission. People really love working there," he says. "I couldn't find the chink in their armor." He has invested in the company twice. "I wish there were a Green Zebra in my town," he says. 

Maybe, someday soon, there will be. Sedlar is amidst a Series B funding round to raise $10 million, and is planning to open three stores outside Oregon next year, starting in Seattle. Eventually, she hopes to expand to the East Coast.

While it will take many years before Green Zebra can reach 7-Eleven's level of market domination, with more than 9,000 stores, that's all right with Sedlar. Like the Green Zebra tomato, Sedlar's chain is OK with growing organically.

The Green Rush

Turns out, there's lots of money to be made by servicing the companies that are growing and selling legal weed.  I wrote this piece for the November issue of Inc. 

 

Marijuana has had a shady past, but it's on the cusp of having a very conventional future. In 2017, U.S. consumers spent $8.5 billion on legal cannabis, a number projected to grow to $23.4 billion by 2022. With that growth has emerged an entire ecosystem of startups that support the less sexy side of cannabis. Not the luxury dispensaries or rose-hued vape-pen companies, but the infrastructure that keeps them going--from software systems to package-design firms. As legalization continues to spread--it's now permitted in 31 states, Washington, D.C., Guam, and Puerto Rico--so will the B2B industry solving cannabis's thorny challenges.

The Instagram Effect 

Advertising regulations vary from state to state, but most national publications won't accept ads--and neither will Facebook. Instagram, however, generally does not flag cannabis content, so it has become a critical marketing tool.

Cannabis journalist Ricardo Baca has Grasslands, a well-respected cannabis PR firm in Denver. New York City-based North 6th Agency represents a handful of cannabis com­panies including BDS Ana­lytics and venture fund Canopy, both in Boulder, while San Diego-based CMW Media focuses on pharma­ceutical cannabis.

How High Will You Get? 

In states where cannabis is legal, every bit has to be tested and labeled for levels of THC (tetra­hydrocannabinol, the substance that produces a high) and CBD (cannabidiol, which does not produce a high), along with, in many cases, pesticide residues, contaminants, and fungus. If a farm's crop doesn't make the grade, it's not allowed to sell it.

A handful of regulatory-driven testing labs have launched, including Cascadia Labs in Oregon, Pure Analytics in California, and Evio Labs, the largest publicly traded testing company, with nine sites.

The Future Is Female

Since female plants produce much higher levels of THC and CBD than males, growers always cull the males. Traditionally, cannabis growers "grow out" crops, which takes six to eight weeks, to determine the sex.

Portland, Oregon-based Phylos Bioscience, which is mapping the genome of cannabis online at the Galaxy, sells a DNA "sex test," which allows growers to quickly and accurately identify sex. "It saves a lot of money spent on feeding, watering, and lighting the males," says Phylos co-founder Mowgli Holmes, who has collected samples from 80 countries, making Phylos's database of cannabis genetics the largest in the world.

Continue reading my story at Inc.'s site.  

 

Love the Wild by Saving It

 

Love the Wild's clever packaging. The delicious sauces are frozen in the shape of hearts. 

I must admit: as an Oregonian who has subscribed to a wild salmon share for the last 3 years, I'm not a fan of the idea of farmed fish. I had this naive and outdated notion that all fish farms are crowded, dismal places, teeming with sea louse. In 2010, I had read in Paul Greenberg's book Four Fish, The Future of the Last Wild Food that farmed salmon had a terrible feed-to-conversion ratio: typically, farmed salmon need to eat six pounds of wild fish for every pound of flesh. But that has changed over the past eight years as some fish farms have found alternative feeds. 

According to the Global Salmon Initiative, the average salmon farm today has a feed-conversion-ratio of 1.3:1. Kvarøy Fiskeoppdrett in Norway, which a sustainable seafood company called Love the Wild began sourcing from last year, is replacing fish meal with microbial proteins, algae-based oils, and grains, making their feed-conversion-ratio an impressive 0.47 to 1.   I write about Love the Wild in the June issue of Inc. (pg. 48 if you have a subscription).  Here's a PDF of my piece.

Download INC_0618_Annotated

Meanwhile, I'm not quitting my Fish CSA, but I'm also going to be more open-minded about trying sustainably-raised farmed fish. Even Paul Greenberg agrees that we cannot live on wild fish stocks alone. Last year he was interviewed for NPR's the Salt about his Frontline documentary the Fish on my Plate and he said, "People often compare wild fish to farmed fish, but what we should really be doing is comparing fish to other forms of protein."  Beef is way more resource-heavy than farmed fish. Love the Wild founder Jacqueline Claudia told me something similar.

"I’m not trying to win against wild fish. Truth be told: It’s some of my favorite fish. For me, it's farmed fish vs. farmed pork, farmed chicken, and farmed beef," she told me. "Great farmed fish is your daily driver—that’s what you eat during the week. On the weekend you get something wild and sustainable and you celebrate its terroir."  

 

 

 

The Secret Ingredient for America's Most Loved Sea Salt? A Failed Tech Startup

 

 

 

I wrote about Ben Jacobsen and his Oregon-harvested artisanal sea salt for Inc.'s May issue. 

 

Netarts Bay, a protected estuary on the Oregon Coast, is an ideal spot to harvest salt.                [Photo: Carlos Chavarría]

While attending business school in Copenhagen in 2004, Ben Jacobsen fell in love with Maldon sea salt, the flaky finishing salt prized by chefs. Returning to the United States--landing in Portland, Oregon--he was shocked to find that no one here was harvesting anything like that high-end sea salt.

After his mobile-app-discovery startup went belly-up, Jacobsen began lugging 275-gallon wine totes of seawater from Netarts Bay back to his home in Portland, where he re-created the laborious (and messy) process of evaporating the water to make salt. "I destroyed cookware and pots and pans and made a mess in the oven and everything else," Jacobsen says. "It was definitely a learning experience." Today, his category-defining American flaky sea salt is the favored salt of celebrity chefs.

The process of salt-making is now much more efficient at Jacobsen's 6,000-square-foot production facility on the Oregon coast, where the company has built custom equipment. Jacobsen's 42-person crew harvests 18,000 pounds of salt per month, which is then sent to the warehouse in Portland's Central Eastside to be packaged and shipped out to Williams Sonoma, Whole Foods, and thousands of other retailers across the country. "Like the people who went to California 240 years ago and wondered if it was possible to grow grapes and make wine there," says Jacobsen, "we're the first in our category to make great salt in the U.S. mainstream."

Continue reading on Inc.'s website. 

Portland Visionary Rukaiyah Adams

Every so often an assignment comes along that takes you out of your typical beat, making you so honored to be a journalist because it allows you to meet wise and captivating people and learn about their work and their passions. This was one of those moments. I got to profile Rukaiyah Adams for Bon Appetit's Healthyish series on "Superpowered Women"—women who are redefining wellness in their communities. As I spoke to Rukaiyah over lunch at her southwest Portland home, I realized that we have a lot in common: she's a runner, she invests in startups run by women and people of color (I don't do that, but I write about them), she loves Oregon wines (particularly Antica Terra) and she longs for our city to be a place where everyone is included in its successes.  I learned a lot from interviewing her. 

 

When Rukaiyah Adams left a New York City–based hedge fund in 2010, a non-compete clause forced her to take an extended break from work. Missing her mom, who had just been in a car accident, she flew to her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

“I went for a run in Forest Park. It was raining lightly, and the sound of rain tapping against the leaves, the smell of soil...” and that’s when it came to me: I am not a New Yorker.”

Nine months later, she packed her bags and moved to Portland, a decision that had major ripple effects. Not only did living in Portland reignite her relationship with David Chen, a lawyer in the Bay Area, it helped her switch gears professionally.

“I could make ten times more in New York, but I was past the mastery part,” Adams tells me, as she putters around the kitchen of her 1920s English-cottage-style home, making us lunch. “I needed to develop a point-of-view.” In Portland, she landed a job as director of investment management at the Standard, a financial services group, and, in 2013, was appointed to the board of the Oregon Investment Council, the state pension fund.

Today, Adams, 44, is the chief investment officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, the third largest foundation in Oregon, with assets of $788.5 million. Started by Oregon grocery store magnate Fred G. Meyer, the trust gives away roughly $35 million a year to Oregon-based social justice and advocacy organizations, equitable education and affordable housing initiatives, and environmental programs. These grants are only possible due to the success of the Meyer investment portfolio, which Adams manages.

“Rukaiyah is tackling big, thorny, important, often fraught issues,” says Eve Callahan, an executive vice president at Portland-based Umpqua Bank and long-time admirer. “And she’s doing it with such grace and generosity.”

But when I ask her what she does at Meyer, Adam’s reply is pithy: “My job is to make the money.”

Long runs in nature—she loves jogging along the Willamette River as well as in 5,200-acre Forest Park—help keep Adams poised in her high-pressure position. “Believe it or not, being healthy and having outlets is pretty important to the technical requirements of the job,” she says as we sit at her marble kitchen table, eating iceberg lettuce with goat cheese, sliced cucumbers and radishes, and shaved carrots, along with avocado smeared on toasted sourdough. “If the person managing money is pulling out her hair and crying, it generates a lot of stress!”

In high school, she played basketball and soccer, and, at Carleton College in Minnesota, she was passionate about rugby. Running has even spurred radical investment changes that have been good for the Meyer portfolio.

“Once, in 2014, I was running in Forest Park and stopped and heard the trickle of water and decided that day to switch our investments from oil to clean water.” She has not regretted the decision—global water stocks continue to outperform oil stocks by a considerable margin.

More recently, Adams has shifted Meyer’s strategy from a more traditional one of investing in global markets to mission-related regional investing.

“Historically, Meyer has focused on venture capital and accelerators—which has done quite well,” says Adams. “But, looking back over who has benefitted from that investing, it’s the same people who normally benefit.” Over the past year, Adams has stepped up investments in businesses run by women and people of color. In 2016, she invested $2 million in Nitin Rai’s Elevate Capital, a fund that invests in Pacific Northwest startups led by women and minorities. (Elevate was a seed investor in feminist tomboy clothing company Wildfang as well as in Hue Noir, a makeup company geared to people of color.)

But sexy startups only comprise a small part of Oregon’s economy. “The reality is that most brown people and people of color are employed by small businesses. And we need to grow those businesses,” Adams says. At the moment, Adams has her eye on a few businesses around the state. She’s particularly keen to invest in firms that bridge the urban-rural divide. “They don’t know it, but I’m watching them closely,” Adams says, conspiratorially. “I’m watching how they respond to stress. How they manage their time. How steady they are over time. When you invest in someone, it’s like getting married to them.”

On that subject, on New Year’s Eve, Adams wed Chen in an elegant ceremony at the Parker Palm Springs. Adams paused as she sliced vegetables for our salad to show me some photos: One of her and Chen all dressed up in their wedding best, looking radiant and joyous; one of Adams hugging her mom in front of a decorative concrete screen wall.

Several times during our interview, she tells me with pride what a fabulous cook Chen is. The youngest of three boys (by about a decade), he spent a lot of time at home with his mom, who taught him to be confident in a kitchen. He has a habit of leaving a cookbook lying on the kitchen counter—Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok, for instance, or Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty—with a note: “Pick a recipe.” Adams grabs the Pok-Pok cookbook and flips to Ricker’s recipe for Vietnamese turmeric-marinated catfish with noodles and herbs, and I glimpse a note she scrawled beneath it commemorating that he made it for her on Valentine’s Day last year. Adams says their division of labor is simple: she takes care of the baking and roasting, and he does all the cooking. (She happily does the dishes.)

Adams also loves Oregon wines, particularly winemaker Maggie Harrison’s Antica Terra. (“All I do is hug the bottles when I get them,” Adams says.) But her weekday routine does not allow for leisurely meals—at least until dinner. Like many other West Coast investors, she’s up by 6:00 a.m. to check the markets. “So even if I’m not at work, I’m working.” If she runs in the morning before work, she’ll grab a yogurt or piece of fruit on her way out the door. “I love those shredded wheat things that have sugar on top, which I probably shouldn’t eat, but they’re delicious,” she says. Once at the Meyer Memorial Trust office in the Pearl District, she’s at her desk for a few hours, and then around 11:00 a.m. she goes for a 20-minute walk. “I usually have to miss lunch, then I have to gobble it standing up at the sink,” she says. In an effort to eat more mindfully, she’s started bringing leftovers. By around 3:00 p.m., she’s ready for a cup of coffee and a walk—without her phone. “I like to smell the city and see people,” says Adams.

Lately, though, she’s working on cutting back. “2018 is going to be the year of no. I have two talks to give this year, and that’s it,” Adams tells me, with what sounds like resolution. But you get a sense that this woman would never be satisfied sitting on the sidelines.

When Adams moved back to Portland in 2011, she found a city in flux. Always a majority-white city, Portland was gentrifying at a rapid clip, with black and brown families being pushed out to the suburbs. A fourth generation Portlander—her great grandmother moved to Portland from Louisiana in the late 1950s—she had already witnessed gentrification first hand. Walnut Park, the neighborhood she grew up in, is now known as the Alberta Arts district.

As we eat, she tells me the devastating history of Lower Albina, better known today as the Rose Quarter. A vibrant African American and immigrant neighborhood full of bungalows, jazz clubs, corner groceries, and churches, it was affordable and easily walkable to downtown and the neighborhood known as the garment district (now the Pearl). In the late 1950s, the city declared the area blighted and leveled it, making way for the Interstate, Memorial Coliseum, and a hospital that never materialized. Residents, including Adams’ great grandmother and the German family she rented a room from, were forced to move out. It was an act of racial injustice that many Portlanders are still smarting from.

Adams is now on the board of Albina Vision, a coalition of community leaders and developers that aims to redevelop the Rose Quarter with affordability, equity, and walkability in mind. If Adams and the rest of the Albina Vision board get their way, the Rose Quarter will have a public connection to the Willamette River (right now, the lovely bike-and-pedestrian Eastbank Esplanade ends abruptly at the Steel Bridge), a walkable street grid from the 1950s, and affordable housing as a form of reparations to the families who were displaced.

Adams pauses and her voice drops to a whisper, so that I need to lean in to hear her. “My grandmother wrote in her Bible, ‘Dear God, I hope I’ve made the right decision in bringing my family to this place. And someday, I hope that one of my children has love, meaningful work, and safety.’” says Adams. “And I am that child.”

Why Hyperfocused Wine Clubs are on the Rise

This story was published on SevenFifty Daily last week.

From grower Champagnes to Oregon producers, niche interests are fueling subscription services

Wine clubs are nothing new. They’ve been around since at least 1972, when the the Wine of the Month Club was founded. Even publications like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Nation have wine clubs. But over the years, this sector of the wine industry has stagnated, according to Paul Mabray, a veteran of the successful wine tech startups Wine Direct and VinTank.

Until recently, that is.

A flurry of hyperfocused online wine clubs have launched over the past few years and appear to be thriving. There’s a wine club for organic and biodynamic wine. There’s one that focuses exclusively on Oregon producers and one that ships only Champagne; there’s even a club that singles out wines from women-owned wineries in Sonoma County. These subscription wine clubs are startups that are either self-financed or financed by investors (that is, they’re not financed by wineries).

“The subscription economy is in full force,” says Mabray, who is known in the wine industry as “the dean of digital.” “It’s a whole new rebirth of this thing that wineries have been doing for the longest time.” Though there are no statistics for subscription wine services (aka online wine clubs), Mabray, who is on the board of the startup Clubzz, a wine subscription management tool, says this sector is growing “very strongly.”

The rebirth of online wine clubs echoes the popularity of subscription services in general. Consumers are now buying personalized wardrobes on Stitch Fix, new razor blades on Harry’s Razors, and gourmet dinner ingredients on Blue Apron. Even Amazon has gotten in on the action with Subscribe & Save—customers get 15 percent off when they order the same staples on a regular basis. Consumers love the convenience, personalized service, and (in some cases) discounts. “And for companies,” says Mabray, “subscription services create a predictable revenue stream.” A recent survey by McKinsey & Company shows that the subscription economy has grown by more than 100 percent a year over the past five years, with the largest retailers generating more than $2.6 billion in subscription sales in 2016 (up from $57 million in 2011).

Etty Lewensztain launched Plonk Wine Merchants in 2010 as a highly selective online wine shop. “It was a digital version of that cool wine boutique in your neighborhood,” says Lewensztain. “I was getting rid of the wines that are a waste of time.”

But the unique wineries and offbeat grapes she featured on the site were so little known that customers were stumped. “They didn’t know the brand or recognize the varietal,” Lewensztain says. “So we decided to choose wine for people.” Sales with the wine club quickly outpaced à la carte purchases, and in 2013, Lewensztain rebranded Plonk as a wine club. (Though she’s added a wine store back onto the Plonk site, it’s mainly where current subscribers go to reorder wines they’ve loved from their shipments.)

Today Plonk Wine Merchants features wines that have been made with organic and biodynamic grapes—though Lewensztain stresses that she’s not dogmatic. “Some are certified; some are not,” she says. “We’re not religious about every single wine needing to be Demeter-certified.”  

The same goes for natural wines. Though she’s generally a fan herself, she’s wary of selling the “interesting” but not mass-consumer-friendly type of natural wines. “You know—the kind that have particulate matter floating around in them,” she says. “I think those wines are better suited for an on-premise atmosphere where you can have a sommelier explain the wine to you—and take it back if you don’t like it.” But her litmus test is that the wines be made well and sustainably, with no sprays in the vineyard. “Authentic wines that are not made in a boardroom and tinkered with with Mega Purple and so on,” Lewensztain says. “We’re really not into that style of wine.”  

Some recent popular bottles include the Balla Geza Fetească Neagră from Romania and a Pojer e Sandri Nosiola from Italy’s Trentino region. Plonk’s monthly shipments of 4 or 12 bottles include shipping costs. The 4-bottle shipment is $110, and 12-bottle is $285, making it the better deal, at $23.75 a bottle. Plonk features wines only from existing wineries (there are no private-label wines). Though Lewensztain would not disclose how many members Plonk has, she said the business has grown “quite a significant amount” over the past five years. Like other online wine clubs included in this article, Plonk does not accept marketing dollars from wineries. “We are self-funded,” says Lewensztain, “and we definitely don’t take any sort of payment.”

Plonk Wine Merchants provided inspiration for Carrie Wynkoop, a political strategist based in Portland, Oregon, who founded the wine club Cellar 503 three years ago. Says Wynkoop, “Lewensztain does a good job of explaining wines in a non-snobby way.”

But Wynkoop created Cellar 503 mostly because it was something she craved. “I have a big passion for Oregon and for Oregon wine,” she says. “I was sitting on the beach with my husband, and I was like, ‘I just want someone to send me Oregon wine to my doorstep.’ He said, ‘There you go: That’s your idea.’” Six months later, she had launched Cellar 503, focusing on small-batch winemakers (fewer than than 10,000 cases a year) and bottles under $30. The club, which Wynkoop and her husband funded through their own savings, is breaking even right now, with roughly 300 club members, but Wynkoop says they’re on track to make a profit in 2018. Though 40 percent of Cellar 503’s members are from Oregon, the remaining 60 percent hail from 28 other states—an indication of Oregon wine’s prominence on the national stage.

Wynkoop loves ferreting out small producers that the wine-drinking public would otherwise not know about, saying, “I like to call myself a little PR agency for the small guys.”

Each month, to keep things fun, Wynkoop sets a theme. January was “Italy in Oregon,” so she featured wines like a 2014 Primitivo from Cana’s Feast and a 2016 Vermentino from Troon Vineyard. February—“We Love Southern Oregon!”—included bottles from little-known wineries like Simple Machine in Talent (near Ashland) and Nicole Reese in Medford. In May, to celebrate Mother’s Day, Wynkoop features women winemakers. Members can choose to receive shipments of two or four bottles, either monthly or quarterly.

 

After experimenting with prices, Wynkoop now has a flat pricing structure. “One of the things members said was irritating was that [the price] was different every month,” Wynkoop says. So now, two bottles of white are always $45, and two bottles of red are always $55; mixed is $50. (Shipping is an additional $19.99, though club members in the Portland area can pick up their wines at a monthly free tasting at the Cellar 503 tasting room.) Because Wynkoop wants to feature wines that are approachable and affordable, bottle prices never exceed $30. “I want folks to feel comfortable opening them on a Wednesday night,” she says, “[and] not feel they need to save them for a special occasion.”  

But there is a wine club at the “special occasion” end of the spectrum too. SommSelect, founded by Master Sommelier Ian Cauble in 2014, focuses on premium wines—the kind of high-quality bottles you’d find at Michelin-starred restaurants. “There are a lot of people in this space who are discounting,” Cauble says. “[But] nothing incredible is ever 80 percent off.”

That said, for premium wines, SommSelect’s half-case prices are hard to beat. The club offers a monthly “educational blind-tasting kit” of six wines (three red, three white) for $199, or Somm Six, also $199, a monthly shipment of six of Cauble’s favorite wines (a mix of reds, whites, and rosés). Shipping is included.

But most of the company’s business comes from à la carte ordering. Every day, SommSelect sends out one to two detailed emails telling the story of a wine—profiling its winemaker, the estate’s history, and its appellation. David Lynch, the James Beard Award–winning wine writer and former wine director at Babbo, Quince, and more recently, St. Vincent, was hired as SommSelect’s editorial director last year, and he and other writers help Cauble compose the lively, absorbing profiles. (Cauble’s deep tasting notes are included, as are food-pairing recommendations.) Customers can either snap up the featured bottle on the spot or build a custom order for later shipment. (Members get free shipping if they buy roughly $100 worth of wine.) The custom order ships after 60 days or once it has reached a 12-bottle case—whichever comes first.   

“We’re offering wines that people are fighting to get a taste of,” says Cauble, noting that when allocations are small, the emails go out only to the company’s top 500 customers. Some examples of upcoming wines that will be offered to all email subscribers are Nicolas Joly’s Clos de la Bergeries Savennières 2014, for $55, and a 1990 Frog’s Leap Merlot, for $150.

Cauble would not divulge the number of club members SommSelect has on a monthly basis, but 20,000 people have signed up to receive the free daily emails. He says business has been growing by 20 to 30 percent per year since 2014. “We are making money,” Cauble says, “but everything is going back into the company.” SommSelect has new offices in Sonoma, California, and is expanding its warehouse as well.  

Last fall, after the wildfires in Northern California, the writer and brand strategist Amy Bess Cook posted a list of women-owned wineries in Sonoma County. “I wanted to bring attention to female wine entrepreneurs,” she says. “There are plenty of women in the wine business, but we’re not in departments of upper management.” Cook’s intent was to create awareness so that consumers could funnel their dollars to these women-owned businesses. After getting positive feedback on the site, Cook, who had operated a wine club at Tin Barn Vineyards, decided to start Women-Owned Wineries, a club dedicated to these wines. It launched a few weeks ago, financed so far through a crowdfunding campaign. The club’s current focus is on the 51 wineries on the WOW Sonoma site initially, but Cook says that it will eventually grow to include all women-owned wineries in the U.S. Bottles will start shipping in May.

Niche wine clubs like these illustrate the continuing fragmentation of the wine market, says industry analyst Rob McMillan, the founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division and the author of the annual State of the Wine Industry report. But they may prove to be exactly what the discerning consumer desires. “The need is there to get these small wines to consumers,” McMillan says. “The wine lovers that are out there want these. If you can be a trusted curator, that has value to consumers.”

 

Portland, Oregon: the Insider's Guide to the Startup Scene in this Highly Caffeinated Pacific Northwest City

My guide to Portland's energetic startup scene is in the March/April issue of Inc.  

 

CREDIT: Zack Spear via Unsplash

Portland, Oregon has become one of America's hottest destinations for entrepreneurs—thanks in part to its vibrant startup scene. Here's a guide for navigating who to know and what to see in the highly caffeinated Pacific Northwest city.

Talent Pipeline

Co-founded by Nike veteran Ellen Schmidt-Devlin, the University of Oregon's 18-month sports product management master's program on designing, producing, and marketing sports products connects aspiring entrepreneurs with angel investors at Oregon Sports Angels, founded by fellow ex-Nike employee Kate Delhagen.

 Portland Community College's intensive, 14-week "Getting Your Recipe to Market" course ends with students pitching products to local grocery chain New Seasons. Pitches that ended up on New Seasons' shelves include TanTan Foods' vegan Vietnamese sauces, Salsas Locas Mexican Foods, and Brazi Bites, gluten-free cheese bread.

$98,146

Average salary for a software engineer

Source: Glassdoor

 

$33.67

Average price per square foot for office space in the Central Business District

Source: Melvin Mark Commercial Real Estate

 

78

Number of Certified B Corps in the greater Portland area

Source: B Lab

 

12

Number of co-working spaces in Portland

Source: Glassdoor

 

Who to Know

 

Angela Jackson

CREDIT: Courtesy Ecotrust

 

Angela Jackson is the executive director of Portland State University's Center for Entrepreneurship and its business accelerator, and co-founder and managing director of the Portland Seed Fund, which invests in early-stage Pacific Northwest-based companies. PSF's portfolio consists of 78 companies, including Indow Windows (which makes energy-saving window inserts), software firm Cloudability, and apparel maker Wildfang. Successful local exits include Better Bean, GlobeSherpa, and eyewear startup Sightbox.

"Because our initial investments are small, we are able to take risks that others feel they cannot," says Jackson. "We're in it for the long haul."

To continue reading, go to Inc.'s web site.  

 

Gretchen Carlson on Fighting Sexual Harassment

The news anchor encourages women in the wine and spirits industry to speak up and demand action

When Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson came forward in 2016 with sexual harassment allegations against Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, there was no MeToo hashtag or Time’s Up movement. “It was an excruciating decision,” says Carlson. “I felt like I had jumped off a cliff by myself.” In an inspiring keynote address at the Women of the Vine and Spirits Global Symposium Napa, California, this week, Carlson encouraged women to have the courage to speak up about sexual harassment and sexual assault in their workplaces.

Speaking Out

Like many women, Carlson has endured sexual harassment and assault throughout her career. She was harassed by a stalker for four years early in her television days. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote a book in which he referred to her as Miss Piggy for being overweight when she was Miss America in 1989 (she was, in fact, 110 pounds). She was also sexually assaulted twice, in her 20s, while starting out in the television industry. The first time, she had cold-called a high-level TV executive. He spent the day showing her around the offices, making calls on her behalf, and then took her out for dinner. In the backseat of a cab, though, he attacked her. “All of a sudden he lunged [at] me and was on top of me and his tongue was down my throat. I screamed for the driver to stop and let me out of the car,” says Carlson. “At the old age of 22, I didn’t realize that breaking into the television business also meant letting him break into my pants.”

The second time, she was in Los Angeles, meeting with an agent. “Again, we were in a car—he grabbed my neck and he forced my head so hard into his crotch I couldn’t breathe,” says Carlson, adding that she managed to escape.

“Only recently did I realize that these cases weren’t actually harassment—they were assault,” says Carlson. “But like so many female survivors, I thought, ‘I’ve got this. I’m okay. Just move on, Gretchen.’ I bought into the myth that somehow I’d asked for it, and thought I wouldn’t be believed if I told people anyway.” It took Carlson 25 years to call these two instances assault out loud.

So while she encourages women to speak up about sexual harassment and assault—and also urges men to speak out when they see it happening in the workplace—she realizes how tough it can be. When Carlson’s complaints went public in 2016, she was most concerned about the impact her case would have on her children, who were 11 and 12 at the time. “They were of paramount concern to me,” she says. “My face was constantly on the news, and they were going to school.” But ultimately, she says, she underestimated her kids. Her daughter came home from school bewildered by all the gossip but said, “Mom, I felt so proud to tell them that you are my mom!” And when her daughter finally stood up to two kids at school who had been taunting her, she told Carlson, “Mommy, I found the bravery and the courage to do it because I saw you do it.”

Continue reading at SevenFifty Daily.  

Building Portland’s Local Food Economy at the Redd

When Cattail Creek Lamb owner John Neumeister was younger, he would devote one day per week to making the 110-mile drive from his ranch near Junction City, Oregon to Portland, where the bulk of his customers were located.

“I’d leave the farm, drive 100 miles to the processor, pack the order myself, do the invoices by hand in the truck, and then go make 20-25 deliveries at restaurants around Portland,” said Neumeister, who will turn 70 next month. He would crash at a friend’s house in Portland, then do more deliveries the next day, on the way back home.

These 15-hour-days took their toll, but they also didn’t allow Neumeister, who has been raising pastured lamb since he took over his family’s flock in high school, any time to drum up new business or work on long-term sales strategy. And if he got a last-minute order from a Portland restaurant who suddenly ran out of lamb mid-week there was little he could do about it.

“If a chef called me on Thursday, I might say ‘You know, I can see if UPS can deliver it,’” Neumeister said. Which meant trying—sometimes in vain—to stalk his local UPS driver, whose delivery route he knew by heart. If he couldn’t locate the UPS truck, Neumeister was out of luck.

“And then the restaurant would end up buying from one of my competitors.”

                                                     A B-Line trike rider leaves the Redd with a refrigerated                     box full of food for Portland area restaurants

Now, thanks to the Redd on Salmon, a Portland food hub created by the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust, Neumeister not only has freezer storage space for up to 3,600 pounds of lamb in Central Eastside Portland, he’s got a stall for staging orders, an office space, and built-in distribution via B-Line trikes to Portland area restaurants.

Best of all, there’s no need to chase down UPS drivers. When a restaurant needs a special order of pastured lamb, as happened earlier this month with chef Joshua McFadden’s Tusk, all Neumeister needs to do is call B-line, who also does fulfillment for Cattail Creek.

Continue reading at CivilEats.com. 

 

Private-Label Wines: A Peek Behind the Label

 

When consumers hear the term private-label wines, they may envision Trader Joe’s Two-Buck Chuck or Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand, which includes Chiantis and Malbecs that retail for $6. But what they may not realize is that the private-label market has grown beyond the bottom shelf. Premium private-label wines are popping up at Costco and even Whole Foods for as much as $24. 

Private-label wines—traditionally, brands created for a company (often a retailer or restaurant), which sell exclusively via one sales channel—are no longer, by definition, plonk. (Though plenty of volume-driven, inexpensive wine still exists.) These days, restaurants from Shake Shack to The French Laundry, as well as brands like Whole Foods and Grand Hyatt hotels, are getting into the private-label game, partnering with respected wineries like Frog’s Leap (in the case of Shake Shack) and Michael Mondavi’s Folio Fine Wine Partners (for Grand Hyatt’s Canvas line) to make wines that are exclusively available to their customers. Some of these wines are easily identifiable “linked” brands, such as Costco’s Kirkland, Sam’s Club’s Member’s Mark, and Trader Joe’s eponymous label. Others are less obviously aligned with their owners, including Whole Foods’ Wine Farmer or Kroger’s Acronym, which many consumers may not realize are private-label brands. What all private-label wines chiefly have in common is that the retailer, hotel chain, or restaurant often has a hand in forming the flavor profile and style of the wine and that the resulting wines are priced lower than similar wines from recognized wineries.

The profile of these wines has risen to such a degree that the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnist, Lettie Teague, recently devoted a column to the category. She singled out three Costco wines, including the 2015 Rutherford Napa Valley Meritage ($14), which she called a remarkable value. She also liked the 2016 Member’s Mark Mosel Riesling ($10.50) at Sam’s Club.  

“Everybody has the same goal: to buy good wine for cheap,” says Andrew Cullen, founder of the CostcoWineBlog.com, which publishes independent reviews of the retailer’s private-label wines.

And every retailer has the same goal: to make more money.

Continue reading my story on SevenFifty Daily. 

Rwandan Coffee, from Crop to Cup

When Agnes Nyinawumuntu began her career as a coffee farmer two decades ago, she picked coffee “cherries" indiscriminately and with little care for quality. Back then, because she was selling her cherries to a middleman for a pittance — 250 Rwandan francs (about 30 U.S. cents) for 2 pounds of unwashed cherries — she had no incentive to select only the ripe, scarlet-colored cherries that create the best coffee.

                                               Agnes Nyinawumuntu at a Let's Talk Coffee event (photo: Relationship Coffee Institute) 

Today, after three years of training in agronomy, cupping and roasting by the nonprofit Relationship Coffee Institute, Nyinawumuntu is paid nearly $2 a pound for her beans, and she is also the past president of the Twongere Umusaruro Cooperative in eastern Rwanda. She has become a respected figure in Rwanda’s coffee industry who is regularly asked to train other Rwandan coffee-growers in best agricultural practices. The money she has earned has lifted her family out of poverty — she was able to upgrade their earthen dwelling to a stucco house and purchase mattresses for herself and her husband and for each of their five children, as well as purchasing livestock and an additional plot of land for farming.

Over the last four years, the Relationship Coffee Institute has enrolled more than 14,000 female coffee farmers in Rwanda in its training, teaching them how to improve coffee quality throughout the growing and processing of the beans. The Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI) is a unique collaboration between a B Corp-certified coffee importer, Sustainable Harvest, and the nonprofit Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Improving economic opportunities for farmers like Nyinawumuntu is RCI’s reason for existing.  

Continue reading my feature for B Magazine, the publication of B Lab, on the nonprofit's web site. 

Farmers Who (Still) Support Trump

In late February, I read an Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof called "Trump Voters are Not the Enemy" that really resonated for me. Like everyone I know, I'd been struggling to understand how 62 million Americans could vote for someone who treats women so abysmally, stoops to racial slurs, and ridicules everyone from disabled people to Miss Universe. I realized there were other reasons Trump appealed to folks, of course, but I assumed that voting for him meant you also endorsed his worse traits.  

Todd Nash, in a photo taken by Brown Cannon III for 1859 Magazine 

 

Since agriculture is one of my beats, I went in search of farmers from my (and Kristof's) home state of Oregon. What I discovered is that Trump supporters have complicated feelings about him—even more so now that the new budget proposal makes such drastic cuts to the agriculture programs that really help farmers (some of the very people who helped elect him). But these farmers still hope he will deliver when it comes to getting rid of regulations.  I think my favorite quote came from rancher Todd Nash, the Commissioner of Wallowa County out in Eastern Oregon, when I asked him if he had any reservations about Trump. 

“His personality! His flippant comments! It was really tough for me to vote for somebody that was not respectful in a lot of ways,” said Nash. “During the campaign, every time he would say something that was so offensive, I kept saying, ‘Doggone it! Don’t make it so hard for me to vote for you!’” he recalled. 

Read the whole four-part series, which was published in Oregon Business Magazine earlier this week. 

Natural Selection: Oregon's Natural Winemaking Movement

Is natural wine a fad or the next big thing in sustainable viticulture?  I wrote about Oregon's place in the natural wine movement for the January issue of Oregon Business Magazine.  

 Three natural winemakers at a recent dinner at Dame, Dana Frank's wine bar 

It wasn’t long ago that you’d find me perusing the wine aisles at Trader Joe’s, searching for a bottle of affordable Pinot Noir for book club. A conscientious consumer, I’d choose a bottle from Oregon or Washington even if I couldn’t find organic or biodynamic. Little did I realize that even these wines—usually hovering at $12 a bottle—contain all sorts of chemicals and additives that, while not imminently dangerous, I’d certainly refuse to ingest if they were listed on a loaf of bread or a box of Grape Nuts. But because the FDA doesn’t regulate wines (that job falls to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau), there are no labeling requirements for what goes into each bottle.

If there were, you would be shocked. In addition to the pesticides and herbicides that many conventional wineries use in the fields, winemakers routinely use chemicals and additives in the cellar.

Some of the more egregious include Velcorin (dimethyl dicarbonate, which essentially sterilizes the wine and requires wearing a hazmat suit to dispense it); a plastic polymer known as PVPP (used as a fining agent to remove astringency); and something called Mega Purple, a grape concentrate that is used to “plump up” the color of a pale red wine and add a jammy flavor.

Though USDA organic standards forbid the use of most of these additives, they allow less benign substances like enzymes, powdered tannins, oak chips, dry powdered fish bladder (Isinglass) and egg whites.

As the market for organic food has soared over the past decade, a parallel movement has been quietly humming along in the wine world. It turns out that many mass-produced wines have been tinkered with endlessly in the cellar; they might contain anything from designer yeast strains and bentonite clay to the chemicals listed above.

So, mirroring the organic-food movement, a scrappy and somewhat rebellious movement has sprung up that champions so-called natural wines. The phrase, and the practice, is controversial, because there’s no agreed-upon definition of natural wine, and neither is there a third-party certifier.

Continue reading here. 

Generation Diner

It’s a Wednesday night in July at Ava Gene’s on Southeast Division Street in Portland, and the dining room is pulsing with energy. Couples sit at tables for two, while groups of friends speak volubly over bottles of Barbaresco and plates of bruschetta. Not a seat remains empty in the 70-seat dining room — just a few spots at the chef’s counter.

The same is true of Nostrana, Cathy Whims' 10-year-old Italian restaurant, on any weekday at lunch. And just witness the crowd lining up to eat at Ox, Greg and Gabrielle Quinoñez Denton's hugely popular Argentinian restaurant in Northeast Portland. (Or SuperBite, their buzzy new small plates-focused-restaurant downtown.) 

All three of these restaurants have won numerous national accolades — from James Beard nominations to “best new restaurant” awards from Bon Appétit magazine. But even restaurants that haven’t gotten much press are going gangbusters. Food-cart pods, for which our fair city is justly famous, and informal food venues such as the Zipper, the Ocean and Pine Street Market are also perpetually crowded.

As everybody knows, Portland has an incredibly vibrant culinary scene with an abundance of chef talent and locally sourced ingredients. But sometimes I wonder: Who are all these people who dine out night after night? And in a town renowned for its farmers market, isn’t anyone cooking at home anymore?

To find out the answer to these questions, continue reading my October cover story for Oregon Business Magazine. 

 

Power lunch: Nordic Expansion

I wrote this "Power Lunch" column for Oregon Business Magazine. 

 

Broder Ost
102 Oak St. #100, Hood River, OR 97031 
541-436-3444 
broderpdx.com 

Hours: Brunch: daily, 7 a.m.-3 p.m.; happy hour: Mon.-Thurs., 3 p.m.-7 p.m.; Wed.- Sun., 3 p.m.-6 p.m.; dinner: Wed.-Sun., 5 p.m.-9:30 p.m.

Owner: Peter Bro and Chad Hinman

 

Atmosphere: Scandinavian modern. The high-ceilinged space, adjacent to the Hood River Hotel, has wooden floors, floral wallpaper designed by Josef Frank and a chic bar with cheery yellow industrial stools. (If they look familiar, that’s because they’re the same ones that are at sister venue Café Broder in Portland.) An upstairs balcony seating area ensures room for  everyone on busy summer weekends. 

Clientele: Locals — including artists, Scandinavian expats and lawyers — who want to taste one of Portland’s most beloved brunch spots; windsurfers, hikers, and tourists.

Most popular: The aebleskivers, Danishstyle spherical “pancakes,” dusted with powdered sugar and served with lingonberry jam and house-made lemon curd; Swedish hash with two baked eggs, smoked trout, pickled beets and walnut toast; and “Lost Eggs” (two eggs baked on a bed of sliced ham and spinach, under bread crumbs, in a cast-iron skillet).

Best seat in the house: The sidewalk patio is the most popular spot for brunch, especially if you’re out with your dog. If you’re seeking seclusion or the weather is inclement, ask for the nook underneath the balcony.

Danger zone: During happy hour, from 3 to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, by-the-glass wines and beer are $1 off; snacks, including salmon fishcakes, Lindström burger sliders and Swedish meatball sliders are $7.

Inside dope: Local artist Mark Nilsson, who is Swedish, is a regular. “If we get his seal of approval, everyone else follows,” says Hinman.

Bragging rights: Within days, locals were saying that Broder had the best breakfast in Hood River.

Overheard: “It’s been, like, six years already. The plaintiff — oh, my God — she married this guy. Her husband died. Tons and tons of money. She’s not letting up. She’s also crazy. If I say one thing about her daughter that she doesn’t like, she could bankrupt me really fast,” said one 40-something diner to his friend.

Portland's First Food Hub brings the Farm to a Bigger Table

I've been wanting to write about Ecotrust's the Redd on Salmon ever since VP of Food and Farming Amanda Oborne explained the concept to me. I finally got my wish: my short article on the Redd appears in the September issue of Fast Company magazine.  

 

Here's a longer version of the story: 

The local food movement has reached a plateau. According to the latest census, Americans spend a mere $1.3 billion on local food via farmers markets and CSAs. (That’s a fraction the trillions we spend in the industrial food system). Though many midsized farmers and ranchers long to expand their reach, most don’t have the infrastructure, time, or staff to do so.

Environmental think tank Ecotrust in Portland, Oregon, may have the answer. After years of research on what the so-called “agriculture of the middle” needs to scale up, Ecotrust’s in-house food systems expert Amanda Oborne has helped spawn a new project. Called the Redd on Salmon Street, the two-building $23 million campus is part high-end food hall, part “food hub”—a central warehouse where farmers, ranchers, and other food producers can stash their product until it’s ready to be distributed. And because this is Portland, the food is not distributed via CO2-spewing trucks. Instead, a company called B-line employs cyclists to deliver product via a fleet of electric-assist trikes with refrigerated trailers that carry up to 700 pounds. The Redd (the term for the spawning ground of salmon) is poised to grow Oregon’s regional food economy from boutique to badass. 

Food hubs are nothing new. In fact, there are roughly 350 food hubs across the U.S., according to the Wallace Center’s National Good Food Network. But the Redd is unique.

Most food hubs are run like nonprofits. The Redd is a for-profit business with equity investors. It has anchor tenants like the FoodCorps national headquarters, retail space (ground will break on the Redd “east” building in the fall), and production kitchens for value-added food businesses. These businesses, which pay market-rate rents, subsidize the less sexy behind-the-scenes storage and operations, which is run by B-line. Think of it as a mash-up of a real estate development, food hall, and traditional food hub.

At press time, B-line had already signed on 30 clients including Betsy’s Best Bars (vegan energy bars), Camas Country Mill (flour), Carman Ranch (grass-fed beef), OlyKraut (gourmet sauerkraut), Organically Grown Co. (produce), and Starvation Alley Farms (organic cranberries and juice). Here’s how it works: a company delivers its product to the Redd and stores it either in dry or cold storage. B-line riders repack products into a trailer and bike it around town from AirBnB’s corporate cafeteria to local grocery stores like New Seasons, and on to downtown restaurants like Higgins and Cafe Bijou. (The trikes have a 2.5 mile delivery radius.)   

It’s hard to overstate how excited ranchers and fisherman are about the Redd’s 2,000 square feet of cold storage—half freezer space, half refrigeration. Oborne calls it “the beating heart of the entire campus.”

“It used to be that all the little guys would pull up at New Seasons in their Subarus or pick-ups, clogging up the dock doors,” says Oborne. “Now they bring their stuff to the Redd and it gets repacked for store-specific delivery.” Vendors love this because they don’t waste time making deliveries; New Seasons loves it because trikes can bike right into the packing area. 

There’s nothing wrong with shopping at farmers markets, of course, but Oborne sees them as a point on the local food economy’s trajectory. “Farmers markets helped us wake up,” Oborne says. “Projects like the Redd will help us grow up.”

 

 

 

 

Power Lunch: Bamboo Sushi

It was fun writing about Bamboo Sushi's new downtown location for Oregon Business Magazine's Power Lunch column.  I felt a little strange eavesdropping on fellow diners, but—for better or worse—I got good at doing that during the 13 years I lived in New York City... 

A lunch combo at Bamboo Sushi's downtown location

Bamboo Sushi
404 SW 12th Ave, Portland, OR 97205

503-444-7455
bamboosushi.com

Hours: Every day from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Owners: Kristofor Lofgren

Atmosphere: The high-ceilinged space, revamped by local architecture firm Design Department, has white oak tables, floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and Japanese baskets adorning one wall. The overall effect is Japanese farmhouse chic.

Clientele: Executives in tailored suits, women in sheer silk blouses and gold jewelry, and couples clad in the typical Portland uniform of jeans and Nau. At the adjacent table, an executive from the Mark Spencer Hotel was meeting with a staffer from Fat Head’s Brewery.

Most popular: The kalbi (Piedmontese grilled short ribs); karaage (fried chicken thigh in a gluten-free batter, served with a dill-yuzu kewpie); and the pork belly and kimchee. The daily nigiri and signature rolls are always a hit.

Best seat in the house: For the utmost privacy, ask for one of the tables in the alcove near the bar. But most guests opt for a table adjacent to the sliding windows on 12th, or, when the weather is nice, an outdoor table on the sidewalk patio.

Danger zone: Bartender Andy Adams creates fabulous Asian-inflected cocktails such as the Tongue-Cut Sparrow — blended scotch, oolong-infused vermouth and benedictine. Maybe not a great idea to indulge at lunch — but there’s always happy hour.

Inside dope: This space, on the corner of Stark and 12th, was formerly a methadone clinic.

Bragging rights: The restaurant will soon have a rooftop garden that seats an additional 30 people.

Overheard: “I lived in Japan for two years, so I’m an expert in chopsticks,” said a dapper man to his lunch date. When that table turned, a man and his female friend met for lunch. The man had just returned from a trip to New York City. “So my friend Shannon, the drummer, was doing a week’s stint on this celebrity show,” he says. “I stayed at the Jane. I saw some really inspiring art. It was a sign of optimism, I thought.”

Lofty goals: “We don’t do part-time employees,” Lofgren says. “We’re trying to build a strong full-time workforce: people who will get paid leave, maternity leave, health benefits. People want to have families. They want to have a life. We want to be part of enhancing their lives, and they’ll feel that good juju and enhance our lives in return.”

 

Portland Hops into the Cricket Craze

My story on Portland's cricket craze was published two weeks ago on Oregon Business Magazine and will be in the March issue of the paper magazine.

Cricket brownies were just one of the many foods on
offer at Portland's recent Cricket Cook-off

On a chilly December evening, a hundred daring eaters and enterprising home cooks packed into the WeWork event space to taste delicacies such as Brown Butter Jiminies and Hopped-up Miang Kham, a spicy Thai leaf wrap topped with fried crickets. Portland’s first ever cricket cook-off, organized by food meet-up group Food Bytes, not only sold out — it quickly ran out of the tastiest dishes.

Portland, as it happens, is going through a cricket craze. While San Francisco has just one cricket flour company, Portland boasts three: Cricket Flours, Poda Foods, and Thinksect.

“Crickets are twenty times more efficient than beef at creating protein,” says Charles Wilson, founder and CEO of Cricket Flours, one of the three start-ups that donated flour and whole crickets for the cook-off. The startup founders were also present to proclaim crickets’ health benefits and their potential as a sustainable food source.

Crickets, Wilson notes, are not only high in protein, iron, calcium, and magnesium, they also contain B12 and Omega-3s. It goes without saying that they are also gluten-free — a distinct advantage when one-third of Americans are trying to cut gluten from their diets. In addition to cricket baking flour, Cricket Flours sells instant oatmeal and ready-to-go protein shakes in three flavors, including peanut butter chocolate.

“In the future, Portland will have insect food carts,” says Ebin Barnett, one of the founders of Thinksect, which imports cricket flour from Thailand. But first we have to get over the “ick factor.” Barnett showed a slide of a California roll and reminded his audience that Americans were grossed out by sushi when it first appeared on menus in the 1970s.

“Now eating raw fish is normal. Will insects be the new normal?” asked Barnett. 

Yesenia Gallardo and Kenny Cloft, co-owners of Oregon’s first cricket farm, Poda Foods, think it’s just a matter of time before restaurants like Pok-Pok put crickets on the menu. Indeed, chefs at ethnic restaurants across the country — from Brooklyn to Ballard — are already popularizing insects by serving them atop tacos, in soup and even in sushi. 

“There are so many benefits to eating crickets,” says Gallardo, whose mother is from Oaxaca, Mexico, where chapulines (grasshoppers) are a delicacy. She believes crickets-as-food will become more mainstream as people realize the bugs’ health benefits.

Gallardo (CEO) and Cloft (COO) are farming crickets in a heated warehouse in Molalla. Crickets need heat and humidity to thrive— 80 degrees is ideal. The duo met at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where they proposed a cricket salad topping in an entrepreneurial business class. But as they researched the emerging edible insect market, they realized that despite an increased interest in cricket products, there was a striking lack of raw material in North America.

“The bigger companies were finding it hard to get a steady stream of food-grade crickets,” says Gallardo, a Salem native. Unlike crickets raised for the pet food market, food-grade crickets must consume food-grade feed themselves. 

Poda Foods — the name is a play on the phylum Arthropoda — was born. Winning the $25,000 Sabin Sustainable Venture Prize at Yale helped finance start-up costs. But Cloft and Gallardo have not sought a first round of equity investment because they first want to prove to would-be investors that there’s demand for edible crickets. “We’re boot-strapping our way to building up the cricket production in the states,” says Cloft. 

Cricket powder is still expensive, averaging between $30-$40 a pound, wholesale. Poda Foods, which will eventually produce cricket flour, too, hopes to bring the price down to $25 a pound.

They already have their first customer: Portland "paleo" bar company Grok. Thinksect, because it sources from practiced cricket farmers in Thailand, can get the wholesale price down to $20 a pound, but that’s only for a bulk order of 300-500 pounds.

Thinksect supplies a handful of “entomophagy start-ups” around the country, including San Francisco-based Chirps — “Eat What Bugs You!” — a cricket snack food company founded by three Harvard grads. Demand is still fairly small overall, though; a good month sees Thinksect moving 200 pounds of flour. 

At least two billion people world-wide regularly eat insects, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. The practice is particularly common in Asia and Africa but also in Australia, Central America, and South America. But the trend has only recently started in the U.S.

In addition to Chirps, which makes cricket flour tortilla chips, two U.S. cricket energy bar companies have gotten serious investment: Chapul scored $50,000 from Mark Cuban of Shark Tank, and Exo had an impressive first seed round of $1.2 million. Tyler Florence’s Florence Group holds equity in Bitty Foods in San Francisco.

hamachi crudo in a squid ink and cricket cornet, topped with cricket "chicharrones"—yum!

Back at the Cook-off, Portlanders who lingered into the evening were rewarded with cricket creations by professional chefs: hamachi crudo in a squid ink and cricket cornet, topped with cricket chicharrones made by chef Todd Radcliffe from Chicken & Guns and cricket churros made by Isabel Sánchez from Churros Locos.  

“I think we’ve greatly underestimated the palate of Americans,” says Cloft. “There are a lot of people who are ready to make the whole cricket jump. Seeing chefs doing it in places like New York City and Portland, will start to open that door even more for us. The sky’s the limit at that point.”

 

 

Move Over, Kale: Dulse Is The Superfood Of The Future

I wrote about dulse, a crimson sea vegetable that's got the umami of bacon and the nutritional punch of kale, for the February issue of Fast Company. No, dulse is not new. It's been a culinary staple in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and New Brunswick for centuries. But this particular strain, which is being grown in tanks on the Oregon Coast, grows super fast.

Will farmed dulse be a sustainable new crop for Oregon? After tasting it at Imperial, I sure hope so. 

Fried dulse is served with aioli at Imperial

Zoned for Eco-Travel: Oregon's Land Use Law 2.0

Oregon's famously strict land-use laws are what make our state so desirable. But with a new flurry of farm stays, European-style hiking trips, and forest resorts, a movement is afoot to relax these laws. Hannah Wallace investigates how this could be a boon not only for eco-tourism operators, but for the environment as well

The front porch at Leaping Lamb Farm, a farm stay in Alsea, Oregon

This story appears in the June issue of Oregon Business Magazine.

Green Springs Inn & Cabins, 18 miles southeast of Ashland, is a singular place. A portion of the 150-acre property—which includes an eight-room main lodge and nine rustic cabins — lies inside the sprawling Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. All nine solar-powered cabins are made from felled trees that were on the land when owner Diarmuid McGuire bought 145 acres from Boise Cascade in 2003. The property attracts all sorts— eco-travelers from Europe, Microsoft and Facebook employees, and Pacific Crest Trail hikers looking for their next meal. “People who want to be in the forest but not feel like they’re damaging it,” says owner Diarmuid McGuire.

The property is appealing precisely because of its setting on the edge of a vast wilderness; the 87,000-acre Cascade-Siskiyou forest has one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the Cascade Range, with rare alpine meadows, 120 butterfly species, 200 bird species, and several dozen endangered animal species including the willow flycatcher and the northern spotted owl. In fact, Green Springs Inn is located on “resource land”— in this case, forestland that is protected from development under Oregon’s pioneering land- use laws. (McGuire was allowed to build nine cabins on this land due to a provision in the law that allows seasonal hunting and fishing cabins.)

“We’re in one of the last great boreal forests on the planet!” McGuire says, his voice swelling with pride. “The forest has been abused by human activity, but we’re seeing the trend slowly reversing itself. But people need to understand it to support it.”

In order to do this, McGuire dreams of building an interpretive center on his property that would teach visitors about the Cascade-Siskiyou ecosystem and why it’s so important to preserve. He’d also like to build an additional 30 or 40 cabins, some of which he could sell off to finance the project. But he can’t do that because Oregon’s landmark land-use law forbids it. Passed in 1973, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Act protects so-called resource land — land zoned as forest or agriculture.

“This legislation is what makes Oregon worth living in,” concedes McGuire. “But on the other hand, if you want to run a business on resource land, you have to deal with a set of pretty strict rules.” An amendment added in 1984 (“Goal 8”) allowed large destination resorts — places like Sunriver and Running Y Ranch — on resource land. “Most of these are gated rural communities with golf courses and some visitor accommodations,” says McGuire. (See “Destination Resorts 2.0,” page 56) But oddly, that amendment still forbade small-scale resorts, projects like Green Springs Inn, with a relatively small environmental footprint.

Which is why McGuire, with the support of Rep. Peter Buckley (D-Ashland), is drafting an amendment that would tweak the law, allowing small destination resorts with educational facilities and low-impact recreational activities (hiking, birding, fishing, etc.) to open on resource land.

“Both of those things gave us a lot of heartburn,” says Greg Holmes, Southern Oregon planning advocate for 1,000 Friends of Oregon. It would’ve opened up some of the worst outcomes that have come about under the large-scale resort amendment, Goal 8. So for the time being, McGuire is putting the legislation on hold and instead trying to get approval for his project at the county level.  But even if the Jackson County supervisors grant him a permit to build on resource land, that decision could be shot down by a community member.

“Any citizen with $500 can appeal that decision to the Land Use Board of Appeals,” says McGuire. “And I cannot afford to fight an appeal.” If that happens, McGuire says he would rewrite the amendment, hopefully gaining 1,000 Friends’ buy-in, and ask Buckley to back it in the 2016 legislative session.

McGuire’s vision to allow small eco-resorts on protected land is one of several early-stage efforts that suggest a movement is afoot to relax Oregon’s famously strict land-use laws. Tension has always existed between environmentalists and pro-business interests in the state, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the tourism sector. As written, the 1973 law forbids small destination resorts on resource land and makes it difficult (but not impossible) for working farms to host overnight guests.

But as more tourists visit the state to discover its untrammeled rural beauty — from horseback riding in wine country to agritourism in the Gorge — business owners like McGuire are eager to oblige. Farmers are opening farm stays that include breakfast, outfitters are taking cyclists and horseback riders on agritourism-themed excursions, and nonprofits are forging European-style networks of hiking trails that merge public land with private enterprise — all while having minimal impact on local environments. Oregon’s land use law 2.0 may be a boon not only for ecotourism operators but for the environment as well.

That’s what the visionaries behind “Gorge Towns to Trails” are hoping, anyway. Launched three years ago by the nonprofit Friends of the Columbia Gorge, Towns to Trails seeks to develop a 300-mile trail that wraps around the Gorge, linking small towns and communities with wineries, breweries and secluded natural areas. Project manager Renee Tkach says the idea is modeled on European hiking tours, which allow travelers to hike from winery to winery (or pub to pub), spending the night along the way — sometimes at a winery or farm — while an outfitter delivers your bags.

“This program would’ve been a crazy idea 28 years ago, because there wouldn’t have been any connections between the towns,” explains Tkach. But over the past 28 years, the U.S. Forest Service has snapped up more than 40,000 acres of land, protecting it from development but also making it easier to build trails between towns. Friends of the Columbia Gorge also has a land trust through which they’ve already purchased over 1,000 acres of land. (The Land Trust is actively working with area land owners who are interested in easements and may purchase more private land as it becomes available.)

Originally, Friends of the Columbia Gorge thought the trail would live only on public land. But Tkach says that Gorge-area businesses  — especially wineries and other agritourism ventures —have been so supportive of the concept of a European-style trail network that traverses both public and private land that the Land Trust may not need to purchase all the remaining private land.

“There’s a winery in Mosier called Analemma, and the owner, Kris Fade, was saying, ‘I want a trail that goes right through my vineyard, just like in Tuscany — private land but with a permit,’” recounts Tkach.

Though the entire 300-mile loop is a few decades off, certain segments are near completion. The Hood River to The Dalles corridor is 78% completed, says Tkach, and the Washougal to Stevenson section is 80% completed. When it’s finished, the Hood River-Dalles trail will be a three-to- five day experience with hikes of 10 to 12 miles a day. Tkach guesses that the entire 300-mile loop could be a two-week hiking trip.

Gorge Towns to Trail already offers “Trails to Ales” day hikes that end at a brewery and “wiking” trips that send hikers off with a wine tasting. But this spring, as a preview of future longer trips, they began offering overnights under the category of “Play & Stay.” In April they ran a “Blooms & Brews” trip that took guests on a private tour of gallery Lorang Fine Art in Cascade Locks, followed by dinner and pints at Thunder Island Brewing, an overnight at the Best Western and a morning hike at Dry Creek Falls. A few Gorge wineries may soon add yurts for farm stays, but for now, Airbnb seems to be filling in the lodging gaps, especially in towns like Mosier that don’t have hotels.

Nowhere is the cross-pollination of low-impact recreation and agritourism more apparent than in the wine industry. Wine-related tourism has always contributed a lot to the state’s economy: $207.5 million in 2013. Though the Oregon Wine Board doesn’t track economic impact by types of wine tours, outfitters say interest in their cycling, horseback riding and “wiking” (hiking and wine tasting) trips has never been higher.

“In the last two years, our Wine Country trip has really taken off as one of our bigger tours,” says Pedal Bike Tours’ marketing director Lota LaMontagne. Guests bike a 12-mile loop down backcountry lanes and stop at three wineries: Adelsheim, Bergström and Four Graces.

Lindley and Justin Leahy of Willamette Coast Ride run a six-day, intermediate- level horseback-riding trip that takes riders from wine country through the Siuslaw National Forest and on to the Oregon Coast. It ends with a wine tasting at WillaKenzie Estate in Yamhill. Though they just moved to Oregon last year, their trips have been a hit with equestrians from both the U.S. and abroad. (Justin, whose father is noted equestrian Willie Leahy from Ireland’s Connemara Trail, grew up riding and training Connemara horses.)

“One of the obstacles with horseback riding are the liability issues,” says Lindley. “The folks at WillaKenzie welcomed us and are very open minded and friendly to both tourism and local businesses.” Lindley says these trips are also a low-impact way for travelers to see the Siuslaw National Forest up close. “Although we’re in federally owned land a lot of the time, there are different privately-owned pieces that are clear-cut, so you get to see a little bit of everything,” she says.

Over in Bend, James Jaggard from Wanderlust Tours retrieves tourists at motels and drives them to vineyards, breweries and cideries, where they can either hike or canoe off to the next site. These tours are popular with both retirees and college students, he says. “They love that our guides can interpret the natural and cultural history here,” says Jaggard. “Sipping local wines and craft beers is the icing on the cake.”

Agritourism, it turns out, is a growing part of Oregon’s tourism economy — and not just at wineries. “Staying on a winery, hazelnut farm or hop farm is such a cool, unique, original Oregon experience,” says Harry Dalgaard, destination development specialist at Travel Oregon. Despite land-use restrictions and liability issues, Dalgaard has seen a surge in the number of farm and ranch stays over the last few years, and a “relative explosion” of tours to farms and ranches. Travel Oregon is so confident about the potential of agritourism that the agency convened a statewide working group last year to more comprehensively develop and promote agritourism.

Some counties are more lenient than others when it comes to allowing visitors on a working farm. Lucky for Scottie Jones, the owner of the perennially booked Leaping Lamb Farm Stay in Alsea (35 miles southwest of Corvallis), the Benton county planner she worked with in 2006 was open to the idea. She approved Jones’ application for a two-bedroom cottage even though her land was zoned exclusively for farm use (EFU). Jones had to notify her neighbors of this change, but they gave their blessing too.

Jones, who is a member of Travel Oregon’s agritourism working group, sees farm stays as an essential way of maintaining farmland. “You don’t lose farmland if you allow small farms to diversify into agritourism,” she says. Her story proves her point. New farmers in 2003, Jones and her husband, Greg, learned the hard way that lambs alone would not pay for the farm. After a few years, they were only grossing $5,000 annually.

“Our retirement was financing the farm,” Jones says, noting that you can’t graze more than 40 lambs on 20 acres of pasture. “The economies of scale just aren’t there for small farms.” Now, with just one on-farm cottage (it goes for $250 a night in summer), Jones is grossing $35,000-$40,000 a year. Sixty percent of her guests come from Portland, with the rest hailing mostly from Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the summer, she gets lots of European visitors, who are more familiar with the concept of farm stays, she says. Jones was spending so much time referring would-be guests to other farm stays (because Leaping Lamb was all booked up) that she launched Farm Stays U.S., a promotional website for American farm stays. So far there are 800 listings, with 32 in Oregon.

The other hurdle agritourism-minded farmers face is liability insurance. Because of the inherent risks of being on a farm (think dangerous farming equipment, slippery mud and temperamental animals), only one company in the state has insured farmers until now, says Ivan Maluski, director of Friends of Family Farmers. But Senate Bill 341, which at press time had just passed unanimously in the Oregon Senate and was headed for the House, will hopefully change that by limiting a farmer’s liability when members of the public visit for U-pick, pumpkin patches or farm stays. “The hope is that the bill will lower the risk of farmers getting sued and create an opportunity — a regulatory environment where more companies will consider insuring farmers,” explains Maluski.

Once liability issues and land-use restrictions are tackled, Dalgaard predicts we’ll soon see a veritable explosion of agritourism across the state. In some cases, entrepreneurs are creating an agritourism infrastructure in rural areas that haven’t had any tourism at all until now. Last fall 33-year-old James Good opened Good Bike Co. in Prineville—50- miles northeast of Bend. Located at the crosshairs of the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail and The Oregon Outback, a 360-mile “bikepacking route,” the shop has done a brisk business catering to cyclists of all sorts. But when Good began connecting with local farmers and ranchers, he realized there was an untapped opportunity.

“I thought, ‘That’d be a perfect match, to integrate cycling with farm-to-table,’” says Good, who was inspired by a recent cycling trip he and his wife took in Scotland. This summer he’s offering day-long bike trips to a nearby lavender farm, a dairy farm, a biodynamic vegetable farm, a working cattle ranch and a family-run cheesemaking operation. He also runs custom tours to the Willamette Valley, schlepping guests’ gear so they can ride from winery to B&B unencumbered.

McGuire, from Green Springs Ranch near Ashland, is encouraged by all of these developments in rural areas. And he’s well aware that the very reason Oregon farms are still intact — and so appealing to visitors — is because sprawl is contained. “Farms are being subdivided in every single state of the union except for Oregon,” says McGuire. “That’s why I would defend Oregon to the death!” But McGuire dares to dream for a balance that’s so far been elusive. “I’m thinking if we can write a real bill — something that the environmentalists and the people concerned about the economy could agree on — that would be a hot ticket.” 

To see the original on OBM's web site, click here. 

Grape Expectations: why are big players in the wine industry buying up vineyards in Oregon's Willamette Valley?

 

California-based Jackson Family Wines just bought Zena Crown Vineyard, in Salem's lovely Eola-Amity Hills

This story appears in the October issue of Oregon Business Magazine. 

On December 18, 2012, a massive windstorm blew through the Willamette Valley, causing severe roof damage to Kevin and Carla Chambers’ triple-wide mobile home just outside Newberg. “We had a waterfall in our house,” says Kevin, a vineyard manager who has worked in the Oregon wine industry for 35 years. “My wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘Obviously, we’ll have to do something about our living situation.’”

Back in 1989, the couple had bought a 32-acre property called Resonance, knowing that it was an exceptional site for growing pinot noir grapes. In the hands of local winemakers such as Peter Rosback at Sineann and Brian Marcy at Big Table Farm, Resonance fruit consistently made some of the best wines coming out of the valley, according to reviews in respected publications such as International Wine Cellar.

So it was with mixed emotions that Kevin and wife Carla decided to part with their property, selling it to the illustrious Burgundian winery Maison Louis Jadot. (The sale price was not disclosed, but insiders say it broke a record for per-acre price for a vineyard in Oregon.) Setting the international wine world atwitter, legendary Jadot winemaker Jacques Lardière came out of retirement to run the company’s Oregon outpost.

“It was hard to let go of  Resonance,” Kevin says. But with the money they made from the sale, the Chambers were able to buy their first stick-built home—on a Christmas tree farm in the Eola-Amity Hills.

While modest in size—the property has 20 acres of planted vineyards—this Resonance sale is just one of a half dozen recent Willamette Valley real estate transactions that signals the region’s growing appeal on the international wine stage. This trend is being driven by a handful of factors: the drought in California, comparatively low land prices in the Willamette Valley and the aging of Oregon winemakers. But the central reason large, out-of-state players are investing in the Willamette Valley is consumer demand for Oregon pinot noir.

“There are not so many places outside Burgundy where pinot noir is known, and Oregon is one of them,” says Thibault Gagey, deputy general manager of Jadot, referring to the company’s decision to purchase its first vineyard outside of Burgundy in Yamhill-Carlton.

The Oregon wine industry has come a long way since 1965, when David and Diana Lett planted the first pinot noir cuttings in the Willamette Valley. The region achieved international acclaim in 1979  —  when the Letts’ Eyrie pinot noir came in third place at a blind tasting of some of the world’s finest pinots in Paris. Burgundian wine producer Robert Drouhin was so impressed that he sent his daughter Véronique to Oregon to work the 1986 harvest with three Oregon winemakers. In 1987 Drouhin purchased 225 acres in the Dundee Hills, making Domaine Drouhin the first French firm to plant roots in the Willamette Valley.

Today there are around 600 wineries in Oregon. Three-fourths are still small by industry standards, producing fewer than 5,000 cases per year. A 2011 economic impact study valued the industry at $2.7 billion, but that figure is larger today, says Michelle Kaufmann at the Oregon Wine Board. “We’ve had record harvests since then, additional wineries popping up, and all this outside investment.”

By all accounts, the buying spree over the past two years is unprecedented. A year ago, Jackson Family Wines in Santa Rosa, California, bought 320 acres of vineyards in both the Eola-Amity Hills and the Yamhill-Carlton wine regions. In May 2013, Seattle’s Precept Wine, the largest privately owned wine company in the Northwest, bought the 30-acre Yamhela Vineyard. In April California-based Foley Family Wines acquired the Four Graces, which included 54 acres in the Dundee Hills and 40 acres in Yamhill-Carlton. Sommelier Larry Stone, former president of Evening Land Vineyards, just bought a vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills and has planted 66 acres. 

Jadot winemaker Jacques Lardière in the Resonance vineyard

In all cases, neither side would disclose sale prices. But Peter Bouman, the broker at Oregon Vineyard Property, says the recent range for planted acres has been between $45,000 and $60,000 an acre.

Private equity firms such as San Francisco-based Bacchus Capital Management have also made strategic investments in the valley. Bacchus has made debt and equity investments in Wine by Joe, one of the largest producers in Oregon, and in May they bought Panther Creek winery outright.

Then there are the outsiders who have been working and living here so long they are practically insiders. Domaine Drouhin staked its claim here 27 years ago. Late last year, they purchased the 122-acre Roserock Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills. This past March, pioneering Oregon winery Elk Cove bought the Goodrich Road Vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton, which has 21 acres of vineyard.

Wine-industry brokers say this is just the beginning. “The French are coming. And they’re going to keep coming,” says Bouman, who conducted the Jadot sale. 

How is this frenzied activity impacting Oregon’s hundreds of small-scale winemakers? A tight-knit group  —  everybody here seems to know everybody else, and gossip travels fast  —  most winemakers interviewed for this article share the attitude of “a rising tide raises all ships.”

However, some also expressed anxiety about skyrocketing grape and real estate prices. Many winemakers don’t actually own their own vineyards, so these “land grabs” are taking thousands of acres of grapes off the market, causing a dearth of grapes and record-high prices. The average price for Oregon pinot noir grapes in 2012 was $2,738 per ton, a 20.6% increase over 2011. And though that figure dipped slightly in 2013, the price of North Willamette Valley pinot noir grapes  —  the most highly prized —  were $2,819 a ton. As a result, winemakers who don’t own their own vineyards are being priced out of top-quality grapes.

Oregonians have long been sensitive to encroachment from outsiders. Today’s influx of well-heeled vintners from California, France and elsewhere echoes the recent migration of professionals from cities like Brooklyn and L.A. to Portland. Will the vintners, like these urban escapees seeking a greener, more balanced lifestyle, drive up real estate prices  —  not to mention bottle prices  —  in the Willamette Valley?

A perfect storm of factors has led to this moment. First, a bunch of vineyard owners are reaching mature vintages themselves — and are ready to cash in. “They’re 60, pushing 70, and need to retire,” notes Bouman, who has four vineyards for sale, including the 70-acre Eola Springs Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills, listed at $2.5 million.

The historic drought in California is also much worse than winemakers anticipated. Every week headlines proclaim record-low rainfalls. As a result, vineyard managers are predicting extremely low yields.

Kevin and Carla Chambers sold Resonance to Jadot in 2013

“There’s no question anymore that the water issues in California are driving people north,” says Bouman. “I got a call the other day from a guy who is growing 500 acres in Lodi [in California’s Sierra Foothills] and basically is considering selling everything lock, stock and barrel and moving up here because of the drought. I’m getting an increasing number of calls like that.”

Few California buyers will publicly admit that the drought is one of their reasons for coming to the Willamette Valley, where the average rainfall is 35 inches a year. Marcus Goodfellow, owner and winemaker at Matello Wines, thinks that’s intentional. “That’s the game changer that no one talks about,” says Goodfellow. “What happens when California can no longer be California?”

When people ask Hugh Reimers, chief operating officer of Jackson Family Wines, why the company bought land in Oregon, he jokes, “Well, we were worried about global warming.” But Reimers, who grew up in Australia, says that’s tongue in cheek. The wine behemoth  —  which owns vineyards in Chile, Australia, France and Italy —  had been eyeing Oregon for a long time, he says. So when the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) decided to sell off its vineyard investments, putting more than 500 vineyard acres in Oregon on the market in 2013, Jackson Family Wines snapped two of them up.

In addition to buying Gran Moraine in Yamhill-Carlton and Zena Crown in west Salem, the company bought Soléna Estate, a 35-acre vineyard, and Maple Grove, a big tract of land near Monmouth, where the company is planting 100 acres of vineyard.

“There are few places in the world where you can grow world-class pinot noir,” Reimers says, explaining why the company purchased 1,380 land acres in Oregon. But it didn’t hurt that real estate here is far cheaper than in other fashionable wine-growing regions. “And I think Willamette Valley vineyard prices will continue to appreciate. “says Reimers. “So it was a good real estate investment for us, as well as investment in quality.” While prime vineyards in Napa can go for as high as $300,000 an acre, $50,000 an acre is more typical in the Willamette Valley.

According to Gagey, Jadot’s purchase of Resonance Vineyard had more to do with the valley’s high-quality pinot noir than low land prices. “We went there two times, we tried the wines, we liked the wines,” says Gagey of his visits to Resonance. They also loved the specific property, on an east-west ridge in Yamill-Carlton, because it was dryfarmed (not irrigated) and own-rooted. (That is, old vines, not grafted rootstock.) “Those two things, we are very interested in,” says Gagey. Though small in terms of acreage, this purchase represents a big shift for the 160-year-old winery, which until now has only had acreage in Burgundy. They expect to release 2,000 to 2,500 cases of their first Oregon vintage (from 2013) in 2016.

Many local winemakers are flattered by this newfound passion for Willamette Valley pinot — and think investments by well-financed outsiders are a good thing.

“I’ve gotta be honest: The vast majority of the last 40 years has been getting our pinot on the map,” says Goodfellow, who has been making wine in Oregon since 2002. “Seeing big players like Jackson Family Wines purchase here validates the Willamette Valley as a region.” 

Goodfellow, who purchases all the fruit he uses to produce 4,000 cases of wine a year, was dismayed to learn that one of his regular fruit sources  —  Bishop Creek Cellars  —  was on the market.  “I’ve been producing wine from that vineyard since 2005,” he says wistfully.

But the general sentiment amongst Oregon winemakers, he says, is that these recent acquisitions may turn out to be a great boon for the region. “What’s happening now is proof that we have a grown-up wine region. We’re not the little brother to Burgundy anymore.”

Thirty-five-year-old urban winemaker Thomas Monroe at Division Winemaking Company in Southeast Portland relies on other growers for all of his fruit too. Despite being pushed out of three vineyards  —  and being turned down by another  —  Monroe, too, is sanguine about the influx of out-of-state winemakers. “It causes some short-term supply chain issues,” he says. “But ultimately, it’s an accolade  —  these people believe in Oregon. They have a lot of money behind them. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t know that they would be able to make a high-quality product from this state.”

Oregon winemaker Eugenia Keegan

One thing that’s engendered good will is that most of these newcomers have hired well-regarded Oregon winemakers. “Jackson Family Wines has employed Eugenia Keegan, who is extraordinarily well-loved in Oregon,” says Goodfellow. (Keegan, who is general manager at JFW, came from Four Graces in Dundee.) JFW also hired Tony Rynders; Precept hired Sarah Cabot. Some companies have even continued allowing local winemakers to buy grapes from their new properties  —  at least for the time being. Lynn Penner-Ash, for one, was able to negotiate a long-term deal with JFW that allows her to keep buying grapes from one particular 3.5-acre block of the Zena Crown Vineyard. “We have worked with this site since its first crop in 2007 and have consistently done well in the press with the wines we produce from there,” says Penner-Ash. “It would be difficult to see our block go.”

But underneath this upbeat acceptance of outsiders lies a barely articulated wariness. The Willamette Valley has always positioned itself as the anti-Napa. Even today, tasting fees  —  if they exist  —  are minimal. And though there are plenty of fancy LEED-certified tasting rooms, there are just as many unheated sheds or scrappy living rooms where wine lovers taste by appointment only. Most established winemakers also have a philosophical commitment to keeping bottle prices affordable.

This presents a conundrum. One of the repercussions of these recent land grabs is that grape prices are through the roof. “In my 35 years in this industry, I have never seen grape prices higher than they are now,” says Kevin Chambers. And grapes from acclaimed sites like Shea Vineyards go for as much as $4,500 a ton.

Though of course a boon for vineyard owners, these higher grape prices mean wineries that don’t own their own vineyards are having to scramble to find new grape sources, or pay a premium.

Monroe and his wife, Kate, have felt the pinch of these price increases. Though they haven’t been directly impacted by the recent vineyard sales (yet), they have been priced out of a few of their regular fruit sources. Just four years ago, when he made his first Oregon vintage, Monroe was paying in the mid-$2,000 range per ton for pinot noir grapes. This year he’s paying well over $3,000.

Despite rising grape prices, Ken Pahlow, winemaker at Walter Scott Wines in the Eola-Amity Hills, hews to a $45 per bottle threshold. “I always felt that if Russ Raney [former winemaker at Evesham Wood]  —  after 25 years in the business  — if his most expensive wine was $44, how could I come in and charge more?” Pahlow says about Raney’s Cuvée J, which Pahlow considers to be one of the best wines in the valley.

“Nearly 40% of our production is Willamette Valley pinot noir or chardonnay that retails for $23,” he says. “Once you get over $40, $45, you’re not going to sell a lot of wine to the Portland market.” 

The newcomers  —  Jackson Family Wines, Jadot and Precept  —  are undeterred. Jackson’s entry-level Oregon Pinot under the La Crema label, released in April, retails for $35, and the company’s Gran Moraine Yamhill-Carlton Pinot is $45. These higher price points are strategic. “We didn’t go up there to try to bring the market down,” says COO Reimers. “If anything, we went up there because we saw an opportunity to elevate the market and the industry by producing wines at much higher price points.”

Elevating the market is a lofty goal. Elevating land prices … not so much. Peter Rosback at Sineann Winery — who purchases 100% of his grapes  —  says he was hurt by Kevin Chambers’ sale of Resonance Vineyard. “Kevin  —  he’s a friend of mine  —  he needed the money, but that pinot noir was really special,” says Rosback. He’s also frustrated by “California carpetbaggers” who have snapped up prime vineyards in the Willamette Valley. 

“It’s annoyed me and friends of mine mostly because we aren’t rich,” says Rosback. “Winemaking is not a highly profitable enterprise. Our margins are low, and we have competition from all over the world.”

The winemaking process at Trisaetum Winery, where Jadot makes its wine. From top to bottom: The fruit is sorted, then dumped into a vat to ferment. During the fermentation process, juice is drained from the bottom of the vat and pumped back to the top in a process called "pumping over."

Yet overall, even Rosback thinks these investments by well-financed outsiders are a good thing. “It’s validation of what our pioneers figured out 40 years ago,” he says.

This is a good outlook to have, since the acquisitions by outside winemakers show no signs of slowing down. In September California music executive Jay Boberg, chairman of digital music provider INgrooves, and Jean-Nicolas Méo of Domaine Meo-Camuzet in Burgundy bought the 13-acre Bishop Creek Cellars vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton. Bouman says a few additional high-profile French winemakers are poking around, and he’s also shown properties to Californian, Italian and even Brazilian buyers. Mike McLain at McLain & Associates Vineyard Properties in Albany confirms the interest from California and abroad, saying his phone is ringing off the hook. “We’re getting a lot of calls from all over!” he says.

 And yet the question remains: Can the Willamette Valley make room for these deep-pocketed newcomers while maintaining its unpretentious, laid-back vibe? Or does their arrival signal a shift in the landscape  —  like the entrance of a shiny new Starbucks that drives up rents and latte prices in its wake?
Gone are the days when a winemaker of modest means could buy land in the Willamette Valley without significant outside investments. 

“The water is much deeper than it was 12 years ago when I started,” says Goodfellow. “Your margin for error is less. You have to elevate your game.”
But if you can’t afford a vineyard  —  or land on which to plant one  —  then you’re stuck paying $3,500 a ton for pinot noir grapes … at least for a few years. People are planting like crazy right now, according to Goodfellow and others, so prices should come down in three years, when those vineyards start bearing fruit.

Which brings us back to per-bottle prices. The fastest-growing segment of the wine industry is the upper end of the wine market  —  those that sell for $20 a bottle or more. Plenty of Oregon winemakers already charge $50 or more per bottle. But with grape prices higher than ever  —  and Jackson Family Wines and other newcomers charging more per bottle — the idealistic Oregon winemakers who want to keep pinots affordable may have to rethink their strategy.

Maybe, just maybe, all these changes in the valley  —  not to mention the continued drought in California propelling winemakers to move north  —  will give Oregon winemakers permission to charge a little more for their wine. That would be a boon for Oregon winemakers, if not exactly for consumers. 

As for Kevin Chambers: He had planned to farm hazelnuts on his new property in west Salem but can’t shake the grape-growing bug. “This property is crying out to be a vineyard,” he says of his new southeast-facing property, which spans the crown of the Eola-Amity Hills. Once Chambers rips out 62,000 more Christmas trees, he’ll plant grafted rootstock. He intends to sell his grapes to local winemakers. “It’s all cyclical. Prices are very high right now. We’ll see quite a bit of planting over the next five years, and then prices will come down again.” 

 

An Interview with David Lively at Organically Grown Co.

This story originally appeared July 1st in Oregon Business Magazine

Demand for organic food continues to soar: Last year, sales of organic food rose to $32.3 billion — up 10% from 2012. Here in Oregon, organic produce wholesaler Organically Grown Co. has been championing organic growing methods for four decades. Founded as a cooperative in Eugene 36 years ago, OGC started with less than a dozen organic farms. “And some of those were big gardens!” recalls David Lively, one of the founders.

Though it became a for-profit company in 1983, OGC (like another local organic success story, Bob’s Red Mill) is also an ESOP, meaning its employees and member farmers are owner/shareholders. Today, the company has annual sales of over $125 million and employs around 250 people who work at the company’s Eugene, Portland, or Kent, Washington offices — or at its 120,000-square-foot distribution center in Gresham.

I sat down with Lively, who is now the company’s Vice President of sales and marketing, to ask him about the company’s growth, why it distributes New Zealand apples and South American bananas and the reason the Northwest is such an organic stronghold.

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OB: You’re an organic produce wholesaler—the company transports organic produce from farms to grocery stores, juice bars, and food buying clubs. But while you’re Northwest-based, you don’t only distribute regional produce. Can you explain?

DL: Even back in the ‘80s, we knew we had to source some produce from outside the Northwest. Some of the growers just wanted to move their stuff, but another group of us were like, “That leaves us with a serious predicament because we’re in Oregon and so we can only grow crops half the year. We’ll have nothing to do from November through April. What’s going to pay the rent?"

So we’re working with growers that are located all the way from British Columbia through the western United States to Mexico, South America, Hawaii, and even New Zealand. We have a full product line, pulling from all over the joint.

OB: You’re an S-Corp and an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). What’s the difference between a farmer-owner and a farmer who merely has their produce distributed by you?

DL: Owners’ shares are worth value and so their shares increase as the company grows. We’ve got growers who, when they joined and put down $15,000 in the ‘80s, are worth tens of millions of dollars now. Owners vote for the board of directors and they may serve on the board of directors. At some point, they can retire and the business will buy their shares.

OB: How many growers do you work with, total?

DL: It’s hard to say because some of those growers are disguised behind brokers. We work with an outfit called Awe Sum Organics, which works with apple growers in New Zealand. We only bill Awe Sum, but they represent a lot of growers. Same with our banana deal: we only work with Organics Unlimited, but Mayra [Velazquez de Leon] represents growers who work in Southern Mexico. But I’d say about 240.

Continue reading at Oregon Business Magazine. 

Behind-the-Scenes at a Portland Food Cart

This story originally appeared in Oregon Business Magazine

In case you hadn’t noticed, our food cart scene here in Portland is booming. Heralded as the most vibrant street food culture in the country, if not the world, it’s been breathlessly written about in glossy food magazines from Saveur to serious newspapers like the Guardian. (Sample line: “Portland's food carts have fed millions, launched careers and contributed to urban regeneration.”)

According to Brett Burmeister, managing editor and co-owner of Food Carts Portland, there are currently about 525 year-round food carts in town, more if you count catering trucks and trucks that only come out in summer: to street fairs, the farmers’ market and such. 

With a friend about to open her own food cart, I started to wonder, what does it take to launch and run one of these mobile food businesses?   

First, obviously, you have to find a cart. Sometimes the cart comes with with the spot its parked on; sometimes you buy (or rent) it separately.

McKinze Cook and Sean Fredericks were Peace Corps volunteers in the Republic of Georgia for two years, and fell in love with the country and its cuisine. When they moved to Portland in 2012 with the idea of opening a Georgian food cart, they checked out all of the main pods to assess their vibes before deciding on the Alder Street pod.

McKinze Cook and Sean Fredericks at Kargi GoGo, the popular Georgian food cart

“We knew we wanted to be downtown because it’s such a high traffic area for food carts,” says Cook. “We saw that a cart was for sale, and so we moved on it.” They had to make major improvements to the cart, which had variously turned out pizza, Argentinian fare, and Thai food. In addition to a commercial dough sheeter, which they use to make their khinkali (dumplings) and Georgian flatbread, they upgraded to a commercial fridge and added a flat-top grill and a few burners. They opened their business in March of 2013, calling it Kargi Gogo (good girl).

When Rick Gencarelli opened Lardo in 2010, he ordered a custom-made cart because he wanted to stand out out from the fray. “It was like a little cottage,” recalls Gencarelli, sounding wistful. “The detail on it was so great.” The cart, which was outfitted with a 24-inch flat-top stove, two burners, a counter-top fryer, and a three-basin sink, cost him $25,000. Having a unique-looking cart paid off, though. Whenever Portland food carts got any press, Lardo was always the one that got the photo.

The $25,000 Lardo food cart in all its glory

The cart, which has changed hands a few times since Gencarelli opened his bricks and mortar Lardos, is now owned by Fried Egg I’m in Love on MLK.  Gencarelli, who drives by it all the time, says he calls it “Fried Egg I’m in Lardo.”

Continue reading at Oregon Business Magazine.

The Lostine Tavern: Reborn

This story originally appeared in Oregon Business Magazine

When the historic Lostine Tavern closed in January 2013, residents of the Wallowa Valley in Eastern Oregon lost a central meeting place.

The tavern, located in a 1902 gothic building, had been a cornerstone of this rural farming community since the 1940s. It was the kind of place where locals would meet for a beer or come for a hearty breakfast before heading out to the ranch for a day’s work.

“They did taco nights and socials,” says local writer and chef Lynne Curry. ““It was beloved.” But it hadn’t been a viable business for awhile.

The gothic façade of the Lostine Tavern, in Eastern Oregon

Curry, former chair of Wallowa’s Slow Food chapter and the author of Pure Beef (a guide to cooking grass-fed beef), had wanted to open a farm-to-table restaurant ever since she moved to Wallowa in 2001. But there were obstacles. Wallowa County produces enormous amounts of beef and wheat, but most of it leaves the state, feeding the commodity food system instead of local residents.

“I went to a cattleman’s meeting the other night and met a rancher who said he could get enough beef to feed 40,000 people a year!” says Curry. According to the last Agriculture Census, only 2.16% of the livestock and crops produced in Wallowa County are direct sales. The rest — 97.84% — is sold outside the county, typically to the commodity market.

Curry and fellow Slow Food board member Peter Ferré had been hatching a plan to serve local food in Wallowa when the Lostine Tavern went on the market. Ferré snapped up the tavern (which narrowly escaped an explosive fire this February) and Curry became his business partner. (In January, Lisa Armstrong-Roepke joined on as a third business partner.)  

Curry has an impressive pedigree: she’s cooked at both Seattle’s Herbfarm and at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island. But the revamped Lostine Tavern, which is slated to open mid-May, will not be upscale. Curry envisions an old-timey menu with pot pies, sourdough biscuits, pepper steak, and fruit cobbler. “I want to hearken back to the most deluxe mining camp you can imagine,” says Curry, who will run the kitchen. “The funny part is that making pickles, canning, sourdough—all the things that are so popular now—they’ve never gone out of style here. We’ll do all the things people have done for generations.” She also plans to revive taco nights and pie socials.

Until recently, Lostine (population 213) was a food desert, with the closest full-service grocery store — a Safeway in Enterprise — ten miles away. But that’s starting to change. Last summer, internationally-known furniture designer Tyler Hays (a Wallowa native) moved back and bought M. Crow Mercantile, keeping the 100-year-old general store stocked with fresh local produce, eggs, and meat. June Colony, who aggregates produce grown in the lower valley and sells it via June’s Local Market in Lostine, recently got a $68,000 grant from the USDA to invest in infrastructure like cold storage units and a refrigerated truck that will help her increase Wallowa residents' access to high-quality produce.

The revamped Lostine Tavern, though it won’t have a grocery section, will also expand residents’ access to local, quality food with a deli that will have sandwiches, meats and cheeses by the pound (including a housemade pastrami), and all kinds of prepared seasonal salads — from green to potato.  

Keeping prices affordable for this farming community, where 28% of residents qualify for food stamps, is crucial to the Lostine Tavern’s success, says Curry. She and her business partners will achieve this by raising as much money up-front as possible via ChangeFunder, a new crowd-funding site that focuses exclusively on Northwest businesses that have a mission of growing healthy communities. ChangeFunder is a project of Springboard Innovation, a Portland-based nonprofit dedicated to helping people launch sustainable ventures. The Lostine Tavern was the first project to go live on the site.

“Lynne and Peter have the same kind of values that we do,” says Amy Pearl, founder and CEO of Springboard Innovation. “They want to build a value chain for local markets that doesn’t exist right now.” Wallowa farmers and ranchers like Beth Gibans at Backyard Gardens and Liza Jane McAlister and Adele Nash at 6 Ranch have already expressed interest in supplying Lostine Tavern, and Curry is talking to a local woman who is raising pastured chickens.


The economic impact of keeping money in the local foodshed could be huge. Research from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames, Iowa shows that $1 spent on local food can have a "multiplier effect" of as much as $2.60. In other words, for every dollar a Wallowa County farmer makes, $2.60 is generated in the wider local economy (because he or she is paying employees and buying goods and services at local businesses like M. Crow Mercantile). “That same $1 spent at a national grocery chain leaves the county quickly because that chain—for the most part—doesn’t buy local goods and services and profits go wherever the corporate headquarters are located,” explains Portland-based food systems consultant Matthew Buck.

Another happy result of the Lostine Tavern sourcing locally-produced food? Not only will Wallowa-area farmers and ranchers be able to charge higher prices selling locally than they would by selling to the commodity market, they’ll be able to keep a larger share of that end price.

 

How to Make a Living as a Farmer

This story originally appeared in Oregon Business Magazine

It may be obvious, but most farmers don’t make a lot of money. According to preliminary data from the 2012 Agriculture Census, 52% of America’s 2.1 million principal farm-operators don’t call farming their primary occupation. Presumably, that’s because they need off-farm income and/or health care benefits to survive.

Curious to know a little bit more about how farmers make a living in Oregon—particularly on small and medium-sized farms—I called up a farmer I’d bumped into recently at the Farmer-Chef Connection conference, Josh Volk. Volk, who worked at Sauvie Island Organics for seven years before launching his own organic vegetable farm, Slow Hand Farm, is now farming at Our Table Cooperative in Sherwood.

Farmer Josh Volk at Our Table Cooperative

(photo by Shawn Linehan)

When he was at Sauvie Island Organics, Volk averaged 40 hours a week and received a monthly salary. But Volk wanted to spend less time farming and more time sharing his wisdom about farming. When he left to start Slow Hand Farm, he kept it small enough—.15 acres—so that he could get all his production, harvesting, planting, cultivating, and deliveries done in two days—and devote the remaining three to teaching, consulting, and writing.

As sole proprietor of Slow Hand Farm, Volk was able to turn a profit and pay himself a salary, though a meager one. “It varied from season to season. I think my worst year was something like $7.50 an hour. My best year was $10 an hour,” says Volk, who posted the figures on his blog. Fortunately, Volk—like over half of American farmers—had “off-farm” income coming in to supplement his farming income.

One of his consulting projects was helping former Microsoft program manager Narendra Varma and his wife Machelle develop Our Table Cooperative Farm, a multi-stakeholder cooperative in Sherwood. When Varma asked Volk to join his team of vegetable farmers, Volk initially hesitated because Our Table was so far from his St. John’s home. But many elements of the project appealed to Volk, so he ultimately agreed to fold Slow Hand Farm’s CSA into Our Table.

Now Volk—who works at Our Table three days a week— makes more than he did at his own farm, and he no longer has to market or distribute his vegetables—other staffers perform these jobs. (One of the benefits of Our Table’s model is a shared infrastructure including marketing, selling, and distribution—not to mention farm equipment, tools, and land. The farmer is freed up to do what he or she does best: farm.)  That said, Volk, an avid biker, is committed to dropping off Our Table CSA shares via his cargo bike at Wieden+Kennedy, a yoga studio in Northeast, and his own front porch in St. John’s.  

A veggie share from Our Table Cooperative Farm

During a year-long trial period, Volk and five other farmers have been working as regular employees, but now they’re faced with a decision: will they financially invest in the co-op and be partial owners? Or leave?  If Volk decides to be a partial owner, he, along with other farmer-owners, will not only be eligible for profit-sharing, he’ll be able to make decisions about what to grow and what to do with the profit. For example, if farmer-owners choose to, they could vote to provide themselves with health insurance.  

At first glance, the cooperative model seems to offer farmers a more stable income. Rather than being reliant on the weather, or how much you sell at the farmers’ market each week, you get an agreed-upon salary. (Though Volk works part-time, the other five farmers at Our Table are full time. An additional two part-time farmers were hired last week.)  But as Volk points out, a worker-owned co-op isn’t all that different than any other business, it’s just that a group makes decisions instead of a CEO. “If you don’t make the budget, like in any budget, you either have to decide to shut something down or take out debt,” notes Volk.

 But there are other benefits to working in a cooperative farm. Shari Sirkin at Dancing Roots Farms and her husband Bryan Dickerson are sole proprietors of a 10-acre farm in Troutdale that has a popular CSA and supplies some of Portland’s top restaurants including Ned Ludd, Genoa, and Navarre. But even after farming full-time since 1997 (with one year off to fix up the old farmhouse on the Troutdale property) Sirkin still doesn’t make enough money to take an annual vacation. (And only recently were she and Bryan able to leave the farm with a trusted employee so they could take a weekend getaway.)

Though she pays her workers good hourly wages (anywhere from $9.10-$11) she hasn’t been able to offer health insurance and is convinced that she and Bryan only make ends meet because they live a frugal farmer’s lifestyle. “I don’t really know how we do it,” Sirkin says, a note of wonderment in her voice. “We rarely eat out—though we love it and we want to support the restaurants that love us. I’m not into clothes or jewelry, we never take vacations, our cars are old and used, we don’t have cell phones. Hell, we don’t even have a T.V.!”

Volk acknowledges that one of the main benefits of the cooperative model is that it allows him—and other Our Table farmers—to take time off. Because the Varmas have capital, Volk has also been able to scale up quicker than he could’ve done on his own. The Varmas bought farming equipment and the land—which came with a blueberry farm—and are building a farm stand on site as well as a commercial kitchen, where a new prepared foods manager (yet to be hired) will create value-added products like stews, soups, pies, and jam.  It’s too soon to know if the investments that Varma and others are making will pay off, but many are curious to see if this innovative model will bear fruit.

Meanwhile, risk-averse farmers with a social bent may want to work at an “agrihood,” a planned community built around a working farm. According to a recent New York Times article, agrihoods are the next big thing in residential developments, from Fort Collins, Colorado to Northlake, Texas. Riffing on the term CSAs (community-supported agriculture), farmer and consultant Daron “Farmer D” Joffe calls them “DSAs” or “development supported agriculture.” Joffe, who has consulted on several DSAs including Serenbe in Chattahoochee, Georgia, says that farmer managers at these developments can make anywhere from $30,000-$100,000 a year, and they and their families often get tax-free housing, to boot.

Joffe, who ran his own CSA for years and calls the workload-to-pay ratio “brutal,” says that farmers’ low and often unpredictable salaries are the biggest challenge in the industry.

“I’m not saying DSAs are THE solution,” says Joffe. “There’s still this huge question of how to make a living as a farmer. But there’s no doubt that these developments can create more stable job opportunities for beginning farmers. They provide capital, land, and equipment, up front—these are some of the biggest obstacles for new farmers.”

 

Q&A with Pacific Natural Foods CEO Chuck Eggert

When Chuck Eggert founded Pacific Foods in 1987, the health food movement was still an off shoot of the ‘70s hippie culture. Today — with organic food one of the fastest growing segments of the grocery industry — Eggert’s Tualatin-based natural foods company is on an upward trajectory. Pacific is one of the largest food companies in the state, and Eggert says the privately-held company has seen double digit growth every year. The company distributes 300 million pounds of organic broths, soups, and chowders annually. And that’s only part of the company’s expanding product line. Pacific also makes “soup starters,” non-dairy beverages like almond and hazelnut milk and even refried beans and mac & cheese.

We spoke to Eggert about why his company has flown under the radar in Oregon, how saving a family-run chicken hatchery has helped his bottom line and why he thinks organic food is anything but elitist.

OB: How has the natural foods industry changed since you founded Pacific Foods?

Eggert: There’s a Natural Products Expo every spring. Back when we started there were maybe 2,000 people there; this year, they have 65,000. It’s gone from where you knew virtually everyone there, to filling the entire Anaheim Convention Center. Peoples’ eating habits are changing so quickly—which is great!

OB: Is there great demand for your products all over the country? And is Oregon a big market?

Eggert: We’ll ship anywhere from 250-300 million pounds of soup and broth per year, nationally. About 12 million cases of products leave the state. Oregon is a very small market for us, actually—only 3-4% of our sales are in state. California is a huge market—and so is the Northeast. We’ll ship about 5 million cases to the East Coast.

We’ve flown under the radar here in Oregon. I don’t think people realize how much product we’re doing on an ongoing basis.

OB: What are your most popular items?

Eggert: Chicken broth and roasted red pepper soup.

OB: I know that sourcing ingredients locally is important to you. But with such robust demand for your products—especially the three categories of chicken broth and chicken noodle soup—how do you manage to find enough Oregon-raised chickens?

Eggert: We grow a significant amount of the chickens ourselves. We also deal with a poultry supplier in Dayton. At any given time we have about 100,000 chickens around, year-round, on our own farms and other farms combined.

We process about 10,000 birds a week at our meat processing plant in Dayton: Dayton Natural Meats. We’re the only USDA poultry plant in the state. We do pork, beef, turkey, chicken, and duck. We bring in meat, and process it into broth at our Tualatin facility and do the packaging.

OB: I heard you speak on a panel at Feast Portland two years ago about how your need for local chicks motivated you to save a family-run hatchery in Talent, Oregon. Can you tell that story again here?  

Eggert: At one point there were 10-15 hatcheries all over Oregon but as agriculture has gotten bigger and bigger the smaller guys have gone away.

The Jenks Hatchery in Talent is one of the oldest chicken hatcheries west of the Mississippi. It started in 1910. A number of years ago they closed. It was at a time when big chicken producers like Foster Farms and Draper Valley were consolidating hatching to their own central locations, so the the market for chicks was disappearing.

When Jenks closed their facility, our poultry person, Reg Keddie, went down to talk to them. They got it set up and going again. Now they are doing these chicks for us. It’s allowed them to continue with the hatchery.

OB: Are the chicks organic?    

Eggert: The way it works with eggs is that the chick doesn’t have to be organic in the egg. The minute they’re born you give them organic feed, which we do at the farm. They hatch on Monday and we get them on Monday. It’s like Easter—chickens coming out of the eggs. We get them less then a day old. We brood them for the first three weeks until they get their pin feathers and then we actually push them outside.

OB: What breeds do you buy?

Eggert: We started with white birds—classic Rhode Island Reds—and we’re gradually switching everything to heirlooms because they’re much more active outside. And we’re getting a better, more flavorful bird if they get outside and exercise. Now we’re also using Naked Neck. They don’t have any feathers on their neck—they’re a strange looking chicken. But they really have adapted well to getting outside and acting like a chicken. Our turkeys are all heirlooms, too.   

OB: Pacific also runs its own farming operations, right? So you pretty much grow your own vegetables and raise cows for the milk that’s used in some of your soups.

Eggert: Virtually all of our milk comes from our four dairies—my family owns them. We have organic herds in the Willamette Valley and in Burns. We milk 1,300 cows! The milk is used in the roasted red pepper soup the tomato soups. That’s why those products do so well—they taste so good! It’s all pretty much designed around feeding cows. We’re trying to limit the distance that the feed has to travel. One dairy is in Albany, where we raise corn silage and sorghum. Burns is just alfalfa. So we’re trying to source all of our feeds for both our poultry and our cows in Oregon. It helps the local agriculture economy.  

OB: Speaking of Oregon’s economy, how many people does Pacific employ?

Eggert: We have a little over 500 in Tualatin and in Wilsonville, where we have our distribution plant. On our farming operations we have 60. And we have 40 people working at Dayton Natural Meats.

OB: I heard that you have a company grocery store that gives employees access to discounted produce, meats, and of course Pacific products. Tell me about your motivation for that.

Eggert: Some of our own employees couldn’t afford to buy our own products in the store. We give all of our test runs to our employees or to the Oregon Food Bank and we were doing a meat product and an employee sent me an e-mail saying, “Thanks a lot! I’m a single mom and I can’t afford to buy this at home.” It was one of those moments where you were like “Gosh this is an employee, not a stranger.” These are very good jobs and people still struggle.  

Not everyone can eat organically, but they should be able to. So we opened this 6,000 square-foot community store where we sell all of our products. Then we bring in milk, cheese, eggs, and a whole line of meat products. We also have our own community garden where we grow a year-round supply of organic produce for the store.

We sell organic beef and organic chickens and turkeys. We sell everything at our cost plus 10% —so basically it’s 50 percent off retail. We sell organic ground beef for $1.99 a pound. Pork chops are $3 a pound.

We pride ourselves on being healthy and we want to be sure our employees are healthy. Just because you might be financially challenged doesn’t mean you don’t want to eat well.

Find the original Q&A on Oregon Business Magazine. 

Portland's restaurant scene: is it sustainable?

This is my second post as food & ag blogger at Oregon Business Magazine.

Recently, I joined a friend for appetizers at Ava Gene’s, Stumptown Coffee founder Duane Sorenson’s celebrated new Italian restaurant on Division Street. One of Bon Appetit’s ten best new restaurants of 2013, Ava Gene’s was also Portland Monthly’s pick for top restaurant of 2013. (“With Ava Gene’s,” food critic Karen Brooks said, “Portland grows up. But rock and roll never dies.”) So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it packed on a Sunday at 5 p.m.

But packed it was.

A few weeks later, I went to an industry wine tasting at Cathy Whim’s Pearl District boîte Oven & Shaker on a Thursday evening. It was fairly early — around 6PM — but the room was already buzzing with families, couples, and boisterous groups sharing wood-fired pizzas, insalata Nostrana, and bottles of chianti. After that, my husband and I went for dinner at Veritable Quandary, a Portland institution that’s been around since 1971. There wasn’t an empty table in the spot.

What’s going on here? Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled that Portland’s restaurants are thriving — and that a new place seems to open every week. About 500 restaurants and brewpubs opened in Oregon last year, the majority in Portland, according to OLCC records. As everybody knows, we have an incredibly vibrant culinary scene—with outstanding chef talent and unsurpassed locally sourced ingredients.

It just makes me wonder—who are these people who can afford to dine out several nights a week? They can’t all work for Adidas, Intel, or Nike — or some new tech start-up or innovation consultancy firm. Could it be, as Le Pigeon chef Gabe Rucker suggested recently in this San Francisco Chronicle interview, that dining has become our chosen form of entertainment? “People used to go out to dinner and a movie,” Rucker was quoted as saying. “Now, it’s like going out to dinner is the movie.”

Continue reading at Oregon Business Magazine.

Oregon's GM Labeling Movement—the business angle

This is the first in a series of columns for Oregon Business Magazine, where I'm now the food and agriculture blogger. (It was originally published on December 11th.) 

The movement to label genetically modified foods suffered a major blow last month with the defeat of ballot measure 522 in Washington state, which would have required manufacturers to label foods containing GM ingredients.

So what does 522‘s defeat mean for the GM-labeling efforts in Oregon? Ivan Maluski at Friends of Family Farmers, a pro-labeling nonprofit that works on policy issues to protect socially responsible farming in Oregon, says his group will urge Oregon legislators to introduce a labeling law during the February session. “We believe the economic impact would be minimal and that the transparency would benefit consumers,” Maluski told me in an e-mail.

Scott Bates, director of GMO-Free Oregon and chief petitioner for a GM labeling initiative (that, if approved, will be on the ballot in 2014), says his group is also pushing the legislature to introduce a bill in February.

In Washington, many agricultural organizations opposed I-522—including the Washington State Farm Bureau and the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. Whether or not that means Oregon farmers and food processors will be in favor of a GM labeling law remains to be seen.

According to Oregon Department of Agriculture spokesman Bruce Pokarney, Oregon doesn’t grow a lot of GM crops — just sugar beet seed, alfalfa, some field corn, and a smattering of GM canola in eastern Oregon. Presumably that means that most Oregon farmers wouldn’t be impacted by a GM labeling law.

Eleven years ago, when GM labeling initiative Measure 27 tanked here in Oregon, an industry alliance called Oregonians for Food & Shelter opposed the measure. Their members include agriculture groups such as the Oregon Wheat Growers League and and the Oregon Farm Bureau as well as biotech companies including Syngenta, Monsanto, and DuPont.

Blake Rowe, CEO of the Oregon Wheat Growers League, says it’s hard to react to a potential Oregon initiative until he’s read the language but admits that the League — which advocates on behalf of thousands of Oregon wheat growers — would generally oppose a labeling initiative. “It’s just really hard to do something at the state level,” Rose says. “Especially when so much of commerce is at the national level.”

But Maluski says that for Oregon farmers — even conventional (i.e. non-organic) farmers — there’s actually an economic incentive for a labeling law. For example, Oregon farmers who grow non-organic wheat for export to Asia — nearly a $500 million market — already need to ensure that their wheat, though conventionally grown, is uncontaminated by GM crops. Otherwise, they risk losing their biggest market, as they temporarily did last summer after the GM wheat scare in eastern Oregon.  

Will a labeling law increase costs for food manufacturers? Craig Ostbo, a managing partner at Portland-based marketing communications firm Koopman-Ostbo has worked on packaging changes for a range of Oregon companies including Kettle Chips, Bob’s Red Mill, Lochmead Farms, and Coconut Bliss. He says he’d be hard pressed to find an economic onus to adding “contains GM soy or corn” to an ingredient deck. “Companies change their packaging all the time,” Ostbo says — without increasing the price of their products. (See the “all natural” and “gluten-free” claims that have proliferated in recent years, not to mention Halloween-themed packaging for candy makers.) Food costs would likely go up if manufacturers chose to reformulate their products so as to avoid GM ingredients, as Michael Lipsky explains in this excellent Grist article.

Malusky expects that the biggest opposition to a GM labeling bill here in Oregon — as in Washington — will come from out-of-state food and biotech companies. The Washington measure lost by a tiny margin—two percentage points, at last count. Not bad, considering that out-of-state food and biotech firms spent nearly $22 million to oppose the measure whereas the Yes-on-522 side raised just $8 million.

Judging by what happened a decade ago with Measure 27, it’s not the Oregon farmers and food companies pro-labeling advocates need to worry about. Most of the $5 million spent on the “No” campaign for Measure 27 came from out-of-state corporations including Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and Dow. Only a measly $5,500 came from Oregon businesses.

This time around, food-savvy Oregonians are more aware of GM foods, and a handful of deep-pocketed out-of-state donors like Whole Foods, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, the Organic Consumers Union, and Nature’s Path will likely help the pro-labeling side get its message out effectively. Crucially, Oregon’s 2014 general election is when Governor Kitzhaber is up for re-election, which will likely elicit a higher voter turn-out than Washington state had this fall, which was an off-year election.

“A decade is a long time,” says Maluski, referring to the failure of Measure 27. “Now, there’s a greater sense of people wanting to know how their food is being produced, whether with pesticide inputs or GM or other chemicals. Consumers want to make informed decisions.”