Hannah Wallace

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!”

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.”

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. 

Headwaters: Power Lunch

I wrote this Power Lunch for Oregon Business Magazine in March 2017.  

 

Headwaters 
1001 Southwest Broadway
Portland, Oregon
headwaterspdx.com

Owners: Vitaly and Kimberly Paley, Marcel Lahsene, and Garret Peck

Atmosphere: Last February, when the Heathman Restaurant shuttered, the dining room was completely gutted and revamped. It now has a modern, open feel with oak floors, lime-green banquettes, pressed tin ceilings and an open kitchen that runs the length of the dining room. Striking slate waves by Oregon artist Michael Schlicting hang on the wall, lending the space a sea-focused vibe.

Clientele: Lawyers, politicians, tech workers, journalists, Heathman hotel guests, theater-goers and ladies-who-lunch-after-shopping.

Most popular: The entire smoked, kippered, and cured section of the “Sea Bar,” which includes smoked sablefish, sturgeon pastrami, beet-cured steelhead, and mustard-kippered salmon — all with house-made matzo crackers and smoked-herring schmear. Kale Caesar salad with chicken, the Dungeness crab Luigi, the open-faced Reuben and “Le Grec,” a pita stuffed with rotisserie chicken salad, pesto, and a cucumber yogurt dressing served with crispy fries.

Best seat in the house: All the window seats. If you’re craving privacy, the seats behind the mesh screen in the back of the dining room are best

Danger zone: Impress your clients with a seafood tower. The petite tower ($45) serves 2-4 and will give you a sampling of what’s fresh from the sea: oysters, prawns, cherrystone clams, sea urchin shots, smoked mussel shots, Dungeness crab, and assorted sauces. The grand version ($86) is twice as big and feeds 4 to 6.

Bragging rights: Over the decades they’ve been in Portland, the Paleys have built strong relationships with local winemakers. As a result, the wine list emphasizes wines from small Oregon and Washington producers.

Overheard: Two middle-aged men in suits converse: “One real mistake in our political system is we’ve created an elite class“; “It’s weird to think about being passionate about data”; “I was going to put it into stocks, but I think there’s a bubble right now. Real estate makes sense.”

 

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.

Power lunch: Local Ocean

My column on Local Ocean, one of my all-time favorite seafood restaurants, appears in the June issue of Oregon Business Magazine.  

         the fishwives stew at Local Ocean

 

Local Ocean
213 S.E. Bay Blvd, Newport, OR 97365
541-574-7959
localocean.net

Hours: Restaurant summer hours (June-October), 11 a.m.-9 p.m.;
Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.

Owner: Laura Anderson

Atmosphere: Casual and bustling. The downstairs seating area, adjacent to an open kitchen, is cacophonous with the sound of fish frying on the grill and the whirring of the kitchen fan. Upstairs is more intimate and quiet.

Clientele: Hatfield Marine Science Center staffers, NOAA officials, attorneys, accountants, students, fisherfolk and vacationing families.

Most popular: Grilled fish and chips; vying for second place are the richly satisfying roasted garlic and Dungeness crab soup and the Dungeness crab Po’boy. Another iconic dish is the seafood extravaganza called the Fishwives stew. “It’s a full combat meal,” says Anderson. (You need a crab cracker and pick, a tin bucket for shells and many napkins.) 

   The fish & chips at Local Ocean 

Best seat in the house: In the summer, sit at a sidewalk table and watch fishing boats returning with their fresh catch. But you can’t do better than a table upstairs in the high-ceilinged dining room, where floor-to-ceiling windows provide panoramic views of the harbor, Yaquina Bay Bridge and the Pacific Ocean.

Brag factor: Owner Laura Anderson prides herself on buying local and sustainably caught seafood. There are, however, some species that Oregon doesn’t have enough of — such as halibut. In that case, Anderson sources from the next best location (Alaska for halibut).

Overheard: “You don’t come to a fish place and order a burger! That’s cardinal sin No. 1!” says a 20-something student to his friend. Later, his classmate comments, “I studied my chapters and was watching The Office, and he was like, ‘Where do trees grow?’  I was like, ‘forests.’ And he said, ‘Forests.’ And he was like, ‘What do they release into the ground? Phosphorous!’ And I was like, ‘Wrong! Nitrogen!’ And I felt so smart.”

Critic’s corner: “We wouldn’t be caught dead with a farmed fish,” says Anderson. The exception is any of the bivalves — clams, mussels, oysters — which are raised in aquaculture.

 

Syun Izakaya

I wrote this Power Lunch for Oregon Business in July 2016.  

 

Syun Izakaya 
209 NE Lincoln St., Hillsboro, OR 97124 
503-640-3131 
syun-izakaya.com

Hours: Monday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m.- 10 p.m.; 
Friday, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; 
Saturday lunch: noon-3 p.m.; 
Saturday & Sunday dinner: 5 p.m.-10 p.m. 

Owner: Susako Imai

Atmosphere: The sunken dining room is warm and inviting, festooned with red lanterns, oversized paintings of flowers, and an impressive collection of old sake bottles. Bamboo stalks — planted in a narrow bed of seashells — create a separation between the main dining area and a slightly elevated nook. Despite the overall tranquil mood, the music can be raucous: The day I visited, the Strokes’ Is This It album was playing at top volume.

Clientele: Rowdy groups of techies (Intel is a few miles away), Japanese-American families, lawyers from the Washington County Circuit Court across the street, single men glued to their iPhones or iPads.

Most popular: The tempura combo (sashimi, tempura and rice) and the sushi tempura combo are two of the most sought-after dishes on the menu (at $12.95, they’re also a great value). Traditional izakaya dishes, such as the miso-simmered mackerel (served with rice and a seasonal veggie) or the yakiniku beef, are also a hit. And then there are the inventive sushi rolls.

Best seat in the house: In nice weather, the outdoor patio — kitty-corner from a park — is a lovely place to sit. Otherwise, ask for a two-top (or four-top) at the back of the restaurant, a slightly more private area.

Inside dope: The restaurant is in the basement of the old Hillsboro Public Library, which accounts for its classic charm (old steam radiators, funky layout) and good bones.

Bragging rights: “We make everything from scratch,” says owner Susako Imai. When possible, ingredients are also organic.

Overheard: A German man and an Indian man hold a conversation about autonomous driving and, later, the E.U. The German man says: “So basically everyone pays a certain amount of money. Finland and Sweden also put money in. Everyone gets something out.” Indian man: “Where does the money go?” German: “The money is usually for infrastructure benefits to keep businesses there. The other thing is military — if something happens in Europe.”

 

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.”

 

 

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.”

Consider the (Oregon) Oyster

Cultivating Profit. Oyster farming is a tricky business — you can’t wantonly meet demand or you won’t have any oysters left to sell. And you’re reliant on the health of the oceans, which have been acidifying in recent years, making it hard for oyster larvae to mature. Yet Oregon Oyster Farms co-owner Xin Liu is striking a balance between conservation and profit. Over the past 16 years, he has grown revenue from $700,000 annually to $1.6 million. The company had just nine employees when Liu and two partners bought it from Newport Pacific in 1997. Today his staff numbers 25, including shuckers, packers, drivers, field crew and retail workers.

Clamoring for more. Liu, who sold a few million oysters last year, all from his 500-acre site on Yaquina Bay, is in the enviable position of having more domestic demand than he can supply, even as demand surges from Asia. In addition to supplying Oregon restaurants, he has a standing order from New York City’s Grand Central Oyster Bar for Kumamoto and Pacific oysters. About 10-15% of his oyster harvest is flown to Taiwan and China. Yet Liu has had to turn down eager buyers from Hong Kong and San Francisco, who have been awaiting his oysters for years. “Hong Kong keeps bugging me,” Liu says. “But I don’t have enough to sell to Hong Kong.”

Consider the Oyster Bed. Last fall Liu and Mark Wiegardt from Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery purchased Pearl Point Oyster Company, which included a 72-acre oyster bed in Netarts Bay. “Netarts Bay is one of the cleanest bays on the West Coast,” says Liu. “It produces very good briny oysters.” There they plan to grow smaller-size Kumamoto and Pacific oysters; larger ones will be harvested in Yaquina Bay. Liu calls these 7- to 10-inch oysters, which can take as long as seven years to grow and command top dollar in China, “oyster steaks.” Though he won’t know for another 18 months what the growth rate and density is like in Netarts Bay, Liu hopes to have enough oysters to start selling to San Francisco restaurants — and perhaps a few lucky Hong Kong buyers — by next summer.

Conservation beckons. In addition to the Pacific and the Kumamoto, Liu grows the recently reintroduced Olympias — “Olys” — which are native to the West Coast. Prized for their diminutive size and tangy flavor, Olys were overharvested and nearly wiped out a century ago. Recently Liu started working with the Wetlands Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy and local Siletz tribes to ramp up restoration efforts in Yaquina Bay. “It’s really hard to get this population back,” says Liu, noting it takes Olys two and a half to three years to grow to the size of a half-dollar coin. Despite their cult-like popularity, Liu only sells Olys in limited quantities — five to 10 dozen a week. A model of restraint, Xin Liu aims to show that running a profitable shellfish farm is not mutually exclusive with managing the ocean’s resources responsibly.

 

This story was originally published in the October issue of Oregon Business Magazine.

Duncan Berry: Hooked on Local Fish

In the current issue of Oregon Business Magazine, I write about Duncan Berry, the CEO of Fish People, a new Oregon-based seafood company that's just launched four ready-to-eat entrees at Portland's New Seasons grocery store (it's also at Whole Foods throughout the Pacific Northwest). These fish dishes—salmon in chardonnay with a dill cream sauce, Thai coconut lemongrass tuna, coconut yellow curry tuna, and smoked salmon and oyster chowder—come in foil “retort” pouches and take only three minutes to cook. (You poach them in boiling water and serve over your favorite carbohydrate.) The seafood for all four of these dishes is caught off the Oregon coast and is processed by medium-sized Oregon processors. All are caught via hook-and-line, trawls, or pot—all methods that result in minimal bycatch and that have no effect on habitat.

What I find compelling about Berry—and what I hope readers will find compelling, too—is his commitment to preserving ecosystems (in this case, the Oregon Coast and the Columbia River). He's also determined to help revive Oregon's economy by buying from local fishermen, using local processors, and contracting with local saucemakers (family-run Heritage Specialty Foods here in Portland). In addition to sourcing only sustainably-harvested local seafood for Fish People’s product line, he’s published an Oregon-centric seafood rating card (see here) that gives much more nuanced information on Oregon seafood species than either the Marine Stewardship Council or Monterey Bay Aquarium, the two best-known third-party sustainable seafood ratings out there. The Fish People Seafood Ratings provides info on how the fish is caught, of course, but it also details health information (Oregon albacore, for instance, has minimal mercury content due to age and size of fish). The Fish People ratings are the only ones to measure worker health and safety as part of their scoring system. For more on Berry's background (as CEO of an organic textile company in Seattle) and on his business plan, read on.