As more farms like Jackknife Creek Cattle & Land find success with their direct-to-consumer ventures, many experts believe it’s a good time for others to do the same.

Food veteran Jo-Ann McArthur says Canada is ready and waiting.

“Is it a good time? Absolutely,” she says.

McArthur, president of Toronto-based Nourish Food Marketing, says now is a good time to boost margins by cutting out the middleman.

And farmers can also capitalize on the boom in local, where the driver is because consumers see farmers as individuals with high integrity. “It’s all about food with the story and a real person behind it,” McArthur says.

With 14 per cent of Canadian farms selling directly to consumers in 2021, it’s still a minority, but the number is growing.

“We’ve definitely seen more,” says David Lazarenko, executive vice-president of ThinkShift marketing agency in Winnipeg. “When COVID hit and trust in the food supply went up, I think that it allowed us to start having those positive conversations again.”

But there’s another solid business reason too — the availability of e-commerce solutions to cheaply connect farms and their markets.

Says Lazarenko: “The world has really opened that up to anyone and everyone, without the risk associated with ‘am I going to get paid?’”

Getting started

Like any business, a direct-to-consumer operation requires planning based on a strong understanding of who you are and your value proposition. It needs an operations plan, too, and a sales and marketing strategy.

Strategic decisions are crucial. Farm-gate retail and farmer’s markets may work for your location, but selling through other retailers or just focusing on online sales with delivery services may be a better option.

Do think longer-term though, McArthur recommends. “Once you get enough customers… you may go to your local specialty stores,” she says. “And then eventually you can get into a chain if you’ve got enough volume for that.”

Be thorough with the marketing plan though. As more farms get into this space, the need for product differentiation grows, Lazarenko says. “The farmers that are really seeing the rewards of this are approaching it like a business — they’re establishing a brand, they’re differentiating their brand, they’re telling a story.”

McArthur also advises thinking carefully upfront about product pricing. Cost it out as if you were hiring paid employees to do all the work, she says.

“Once you set a selling price, it’s really hard to move it upwards a lot. … If your objective is to sell eventually at a retailer, you have to understand all the different pieces that are going to eat into your margins and price accordingly.”

Startup costs

Although an e-commerce website can cost as little as $1,000 to $5,000 if you do it yourself, experts recommend budgeting more like $20,000 to $25,000 for a professionally designed product plus branding and some initial paid marketing campaigns.

Provincial grants may help, and multi-generational farms may have younger, tech-inclined family members on hand to help.

Overall, though, your investment in this area should be a reflection of your estimated ROI.

“There’s no way you can get into this without some form of investment upfront,” Lazarenko says. “If you want this to be big, the investment is going to have be the same. You can’t put in a little and get a whole lot out.”

The post Right for your farm too? appeared first on Country Guide.

The epitome of on-the-go, Country Guide caught up with Albright after we had watched him navigate the fast-paced world of value-added snack food for the last 15 years. With his company’s products in more than 4,500 stores across Canada and counting, Albright is a case study of a farmer who wants to add more value to the farm, and what happens when the plan works.

Can a farmer become victim of their own success? Can one person excel both at production agriculture and at value-added marketing? These are big questions.

Albright grew up on a potato farm south of Hartland, N.B., home of the world’s longest covered bridge — 1,282 feet if you are wondering — and the namesake of his future company, Covered Bridge Potato Chip Company, hereafter CBP.

Operational since the 1920s, the farm was begun by Albright’s great-grandparents. Two following generations also dutifully worked the land before Albright and his brother Matt began working at the farm.

Completely unsure of his future, the plucky Albright decided to forgo university and instead enrolled in the Atlantic Agricultural Leadership Program, an experience-based leadership program that lasted two years. At 18, he was the youngest entrant ever accepted into the program.

Since he would never go to formal post-secondary, this was his education, and he spent quality time over those two years rubbing shoulders with many well-respected and successful farmers in the Maritimes and taking as many notes as possible to enhance his street-smart education.

“This was a unique opportunity for me,” says Albright, now 41. “It was a door opener.”

What he couldn’t learn at AALP, he picked up from a business 101 CD from his local Staples store. And at the same time, he continued working at home, learning how to get even better at growing potatoes.

“Basically, I wanted to farm, but I wanted to branch out into other things,” Albright says.

Well, he picked a great time to enter the business full-time in 2002. Prices topped $32 per barrel, almost triple the typical price in those days, and they were able to sell 2,000 open barrels and the brothers invested a new 150-horsepower tractor. It was good they did; it was going to be a while before they could afford to again. The next year was one of the worst ever for potato producers with prices plunging to $1 to $2 per barrel. The bottom completely fell out of the market and the Albrights, along with many other potato farmers, were in trouble.

Not one to take it lying down, Albright got on the phone and furiously began to hunt for markets for a shed full of potatoes nobody wanted. He called every potential buyer east of Ohio from the Canadian border down to Mexico.

But there was also an opportunity in this.The Albrights weren’t the only ones in dire straits. Other farmers in New Brunswick, Quebec and Prince Edward Island were also in tough and needed help.

Without planning it, Albright’s first business, a brokerage dubbed Carleton County Spud Distributors, was born.

But it took commitment. After spring planting in 2004, Albright did something that would become very familiar to him: he hit the road. He spent a full month logging 12,000 kilometres going up and down the eastern U.S., spending nights sleeping in his Toyota Corolla, a tent and $30 hotels, including breakfast. 

“When I came back I had a lot of contacts and two contracts,” he says, beaming. It gave him new optimism that he could determine his own path with potatoes.

He began thinking big and he told his dad his plan: a state-of-the-art warehouse and a wash shed on the side, which happened to carry a price tag of $600,000. His father Wayne diplomatically let his son know this may be a stretch.

But Albright didn’t cave, and with hindsight, his father admits he’s glad his son talked him into it. “It’d be hard to imagine the farm without it now,” says Wayne. “It was one of the best things we ever did.”

Although the Albright brothers “made some money and lost some money” over the next couple of years, they were trending upward. By 2006, they bought out their grandpa, uncle and dad, even though Albright was just 25 and Matt 22. Dad’s only condition on the sale was that if his boys needed to hire a hand, he would be first on their list. “No issue there,” says Albright.

Their most audacious move came the same summer the boys bought the farm. The brothers took a walk one day up to a nearby hill at the farm. Only 20 minutes away was a stunning 120-acre potato farm that had been recently gone up for sale. Adjacent to a pristine body of water, it carried a $5,000 per acre price tag, which was extremely high at the time.

“I said to Matt, ‘Look, we can do this. We can buy this property. But I had this other idea. I want to make our own potato chips. If we can only do one or the other, I want to value-add and get into potato chips.’”

It turns out they did both, buying the farm and establishing CBP all in the same year.

Albright had visited with enough people in the potato industry over the previous few years and believed their family could be successful with a value-added chip company, too. There was one glaring difference, though, with their potatoes. While 99 per cent of the chip world is supplied by familiar, predictable white russets, the Albrights had a rich history of dark russets, which taste as unique as they look when in chip format, which is primarily due to a higher sugar content compared to whites.

Albright’s first order of real business was to acquire a chip production line, which he spotted in Ohio the year before when he’d been trying to make a sale. A small company had shut down its chipping operations, but the equipment remained intact. It seemed the perfect fit for the Albrights.

Which is when they learned that sometimes you learn the hard way. The brothers brought the line home, started rebuilding it, and soon saw it would have been better if they’d bought new.

Getting established

A big piece of the puzzle, though, was where to set up shop. They needed a location that would make sense for their business, and soon, downtown Hartland seemed a no brainer. Albright could help reinvigorate the downtown waterfront, complete with a boardwalk along the St. John River, ending at the famous covered bridge.

Again he was persistent. Albright estimates the Town of Hartland shot him down eight times between 2006 and 2007, although he admits he lost count. He didn’t understand why the town would not want what Albright saw as a guaranteed winning business in the heart of town. Neither did David Alward, the former New Brunswick premier who was serving as minister of agriculture, fisheries and aquaculture for the province when Albright tried to get established in the downtown. Familiar with the Albright family, Alward thought the idea was brilliant.

“Ryan could see with his marketing into the eastern seaboard with chippers down there,” says Alward. “There was an opportunity to have a top-quality product. Quite frankly, it was a lost opportunity for the town of Hartland.”

It turned out no artist’s conceptions or spinoff revenue models could turn the council. The proposal was rebuffed. Albright fumed.

“I had no support, like zero,” he says. “When they told me no, I don’t take no very lightly. When someone says no, I’m just going to push 10 times harder. Especially when it’s a flat-out no. I will just push.”

With the distance of time, Albright realizes how ambitious his plan was, but he makes no apologies for trying to start the first new chip company in Canada in decades. And although it’s a stone’s throw from Hartland in Carleton County, the pressure it put on him was tremendous. Before Albright even had his first PO, he built everything and even had the chips ready to go.

“That put extra stress on him in terms of infrastructure when he built,” says Alward. “To be able to manage it … again, that’s part of being an entrepreneur-businessperson. They’re going to adapt and continue moving forward. That’s exactly what Ryan has done, and because of it there’s a lot of people working in our area.”

You cannot serve two masters

An early victim of his own success, Albright soon realized that finding time to help on the farm and also to run CBP would be more difficult than ever. A farmboy at heart, he had to make a difficult choice. Matt took over farm operations full time while Albright focused on chips.

The decision stuck. The last time Albright sat working in a tractor was 15 years ago.

It’s proverbial that building a value-added agrifood business from scratch takes time and effort. He estimates he worked 80-plus hours every week in the early years. His trusty Corolla averaged about 150,000 kilometres per year driving to tradeshows where he and his second-ever employee Krysten McShane, the marketing manager, would try and secure contracts and make connections.

They would load up their booth, designed specifically to fit in his sedan, and drive to wherever the next show was about to open. Anaheim, Boston, Calgary, Chicago, Montreal, New York City, Quebec City, Toronto, Vancouver have all been visited more times than he cares to count. His rule, which he sometimes still broke, was that he would only travel 15 hours by car in one direction, before he’d consider a flight.

Quickly, they both had their eyes opened to the world behind snack products. It was at a food show in NYC where Albright first saw “GF” on a label and had no clue it meant gluten-free. McShane’s mother was a celiac and she quickly got him up to speed. Almost in the same breath, she convinced him that GF could be a good product differentiator. After figuring out a GF production method without compromising on taste and flavour, they decided to go for it. At the time, their factory was only the second in North America, and the first in Canada, to be 100 per cent GF certified.

When they weren’t on the road, they were busy doing everything together from designing labels and artwork, nutritional facts, marketing campaigns; you name it they did it. For years, it was Albright, McShane and Mike McCartney, CBP’s first hire, who still works at the company today.

“We were definitely involved in everything,” says McShane with a laugh. “Every conversation Ryan had, he involved us. We were the only people he could involve at the time.”

On paper she worked in marketing, but McShane often found herself doing things well outside of a typical marketing role, including sales, helping on the production floor, taking courses in food safety. Her biggest marketing win was helping come up with the company’s initial slogan: The way chips should taste.

The scattered, go-go-go pace is nothing new to anyone who works in a value-added agrifood industry, something everyone learned as the business continued to grow.

“It’s always pedal to the metal,” Albright says. “If you take your foot off the gas, you’re only going one direction, that’s backwards. You have to be growing because costs keep going up. One of the ways to manage those costs is to get more efficiencies of scale.”

That led to a lot more “yes” answers whenever an opportunity presented itself. The farm expanded at one point to 650 acres, they took on distribution in Newfoundland, which Albright terms one of his “worst-best” learning moments, and private label work. It was the last item that really helped the company. Private labeling, making the chips start to finish with someone else’s name on the bag, has given CBP stability to pay for overhead costs.

In the last three years, CBP has had multiple private-label contracts with major brands and even launched a co-branding effort with East Coast Lifestyle, a Halifax, N.S.-based clothing brand. Albright and owner Alex MacLean are friends and decided to make an ECL-specific chip which prominently featured ECL on the bag with a smaller area showing it was CBP that created the chips. In turn, ECL promoted CBP through its social media platforms, which have in excess of one million combined followers. The results spoke for themselves and the two have since collaborated on a second co-brand venture.

“You both play on each other’s customers and you’re getting a bigger wider range of audiences,” Albright says. “When you have two smaller companies that can co-brand together, it’s very easy, very nimble, much less paperwork and much more flexible.”

And that’s perhaps the biggest plus for his “big-small” company that is independently owned and operated: Decisions can be made lightning fast compared to multinationals.

Albright and his research and development team meet every two weeks, constantly reviewing competitors and assessing if there is a new market play for them with a competing or new product.

“If I decide I’m going to make new chips, 90 days we can do it. We are agile,” Albright says.

All the innovation has continued to have a positive economic spinoff for the local county and province as a whole. It’s not lost on the likes of Alward, whose job was to do the same thing as premier. 

“A hundred jobs in our area is significant,” says Alward. “That’s big business and that’s important business.”

Labour, supply chain issues and COVID-19

The farm still produces enough potatoes each year to supply every single bag under its own name or a private label, now tracked in the eight-figure range. Today, Albright’s biggest need is to create a third shift at the plant, which means he needs 18 to 20 more people. His timeline to have the third shift up and running is “two months ago,” a sarcastic nod to the current labour market woes. The company has introduced automation where possible. It relies mainly on people, but it’s a true struggle.

“Leading up to COVID-19 it was more challenging to find people,” he says. “It’s gone from challenging to impossible.”

When the pandemic began in earnest around March 2020, nothing materially changed with the consumer-facing business. If anything, business went up as people stayed home and quickly gravitated to comfort food. Online sales increased substantially. It was a great time to bank extra savings for what came, because by December 2020, COVID-19 caught up to Covered Bridge.

“A year ago, all of a sudden, it just started hitting everybody,” Albright says.

As 2021 counted down, his cost for cooking oil increased 100 per cent within two months. Then propane doubled, and parts and raw materials now require quadruple the time to arrive, sometimes longer. Despite what is publicly touted, Albright says not to believe the hype. “The supply chain around the world is 100 per cent broken.”

Already having absorbed costs for months, Albright says the company has two primary options, both of which are unattractive: increase prices or continue to eat. 

“We’re really taking it on the chin,” he says. “It really inhibits your growth.”

It’s times like these, though, that demonstrate how the value-added business has morphed from a hustle and grind physical game to a quieter, 60-hour-per-week but with increased pressure on his mind.

“Financial reporting constantly, food safety, all the worries that go on, it’s a mental drain and it’s totally different,” he says. When you’re younger you can handle it a lot better. I’m 41 now. I try to be home by 7 o’clock, that’s my rule, I try to be. I try not to work every weekend.”

He’s able to achieve this because of good people. His vice-president Brook Dickinson oversees multiple portfolios within the company and has a drive similar to Albright.

“A lot of my work ethic comes from seeing how much time he’s put in,” Dickinson says. “I try and follow that lead and match it. We can be honest with each other, hard on each other if need be. He gives a lot of support and runway to make decisions.”

Advice to fellow farmers

While having a value-added business seems like a fantastic idea to many farmers — and often, the adventure lives up to the billing — be aware it can skew towards the ranks of all-consuming and away from hobby. At his current pace, Albright will have worked roughly two careers’ worth of time. He didn’t take a paycheque for years while CBP was establishing itself. He has no kids and would be hard pressed to call himself an active farmer anymore.

“You have to be prepared to give up a lot. You’re working all day, all night, every weekend. I underestimated the sheer scope of the entire project and what it would lead into,” he says with a pause. 

He says one of his best business decisions of all time was to hire a financial controller.

“When you’re small, maybe for two years at best, you can get away with more of a bookkeeper, but a good controller can get you quick and accurate numbers all the time,” he says. “I only knew what I knew. I waited too long to have that kind of resource.”

And when you find yourself at the top of your company, as successful entrepreneurs do, it can be a challenge to find a mentor. Albright, when he has time, talks with a hired consultant who works specifically with presidents and CEOs of companies.

“You just don’t realize the continuous challenges that you’re going to face. In reality, there’s a lot that you don’t plan on, and you don’t know what you’re going get hit with. It never is easy and you have challenges every single day, some massive and others manageable.”

But even though he’s experienced all those things, and more, he isn’t framing it as a complaint. 

“As long as you’re prepared for that, have at it,” he says. “That’s the entire life.”

The post A drive to succeed appeared first on Country Guide.

Below, meet three farms that have successfully diversified their income streams by targeting luxury offers at some of the world’s most exclusive markets. 

You said “finger limes?”

Jade King, a 2022 Nuffielder from Australia, operates Green Valley Farms located on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The farm raises Brangus beef cattle and Wiltipoll sheep, and they are also growers of seasonal fruits and vegetables, specializing in — wait for it — finger limes. 

Finger Limes? If you haven’t heard of them before, you’re not alone. Finger limes are native to Australia, specifically to the rainforests on the country’s northeast corner.

Finger Limes are about the size and shape of a finger and have a caviar-like citrus flesh on the inside which pops in your mouth as you eat it. 

Green Valley specializes in the Champagne Red — a native variety, of which King has 350 producing trees and about 500 recent plantings. “Not only is the Champagne Red native to the area,” King says, “it’s also highly sought after by chefs, and they keep longer, making them also ideal for export.”

That’s the upside. The downside — it takes determination to pick them because without gloves you’ll get sliced by the thorny bushes on which they bloom. 

In 2020, King’s farm received some very prominent recognition when the country’s Network Ten television channel called. They were looking for five kilos of finger limes for use on MasterChef Australia. That proved a highlight for the show, and the beginning of a finger-lime renaissance, opening the door for marketing finger limes to high-end chefs all across Australia. 

The fruit had previously been popular with Indigenous tribes who used it both for cooking and for medicinal purposes. Importantly, this also ties in with King’s personal brand and her background as an agronomist with an eco-friendly approach to healthy farming. (She also teaches agricultural science at her local school, and her students get hands-on on the farm, using portions of the land for agronomy plots.)

And, as it turns out, the marketing has been simple. Thus far, King hasn’t had to go looking for finger lime customers. Thanks to the publicity, they’re looking for her, and they’re bring their wallets. Prices range from $200 to $300 per kilogram. 

“We started finger lime production in 2014,” says King. “We sell locally, nationally and internationally to restaurants and high-end food markets. We plan to keep planting more.”

But she also knows she must upgrade both her agronomic skills and her business strategy, which are always closely linked. Over the next two years, King will use her 2022 Nuffield scholarship to meet producers in Italy, Spain, Japan and the U.S. Says King, “Understanding the agronomics will help other Australian growers establish a quality standard for marketing internationally.”

A break on the farm side

It may still be winter in Canada, but imagine yourself vacationing on a farm near Dundee, Scotland. There, The Hideway Experience operated by Nuffielder Caroline Millar, her husband Ross and two teenage children, is anything but an ordinary farm.

It’s rather more of a five-star hotel, combining the seclusion of a self-catering lodge, the gourmet delights of a farmers market, and the services of a personal concierge.

Five of these luxurious hideaways are located on the family’s 650 ha beef and sheep farm, and hosting guests is in Millar’s DNA.

“I was brought up living and breathing agri-tourism on the family farm in Perthshire,” Millar says. “Both my parents and grandparents ran farmhouse bed and breakfasts in farmhouses near Caputh in Perthshire.”

Rated 5/5 on Trip Advisor, The Hideaway Experience is described as “Scotland’s “couples only” 5-star exclusive accommodation. No children, no groups, no stag parties, just 5-star luxury lodges located at the foot of the Sidlaw Hills in Angus, just north of Dundee. 

Designed for complete privacy, rest, relaxation and fun, the hideaways have the layout and facilities of a luxury hotel suite. Guests can enjoy a dedicated spa room, outside hot tub, sauna, modern kitchen with a range of gadgets and top of the line appliances, double-sided fire and a cocktail bar. The hideaways also feature living roofs, and are powered by green energy. 

Says Millar, “We opened The Hideaway Experience in 2005 on our family farm by converting a bothy (an old farm hut) into a couple’s retreat. 

“We have since invested in three hideaways, and are about to build our fifth property. We employ six part-time and full-time staff and welcome 2,000 high-end visitors to Dundee and Angus each year. We also offer farm tours to visitors directly and via the travel trade and have plans to expand this area of our business.”

All of this doesn’t come cheap. Guest rates per night range between £360 to £475 with a minimum booking of two nights, yet the hideways are often booked out months in advance. 

Millar credits her 2012 Nuffield Scholarship for opening her eyes to the agri-tourism sector internationally and the scale of agri-tourism in other countries. 

“Although I travelled to 10 countries and was away from home for 16 weeks of the year, Italy and Austria remain, for me, two countries with a significant scale in this sector,” she says. With an emphasis on food and drink and focused on an intense agri offering with a real farmer at the heart of the customer experience, the Italian agri-tourism market has grown to C$2.5 billion. “This is what’s possible,” Millar says.

Besides the hideaways, Millar is involved with Go Rural Scotland, the Scottish Tourism Alliance and the National Farmers’ Union. She is also an international agri-tourism consultant and speaker and has done work here in Canada for the Culinary Tourism Alliance and Town of Essex in Ontario. 

Making a business of Kangaroo Island

The Nuffield Scholarship is about gathering knowledge, and often that comes from the other scholars. Carly Bussenschutt, from Kangaroo Island in Southern Australia was a 2012 scholar along with The Hideaway Experience’s Caroline Millar.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and Millar’s hideways can be found as Bussenschutt’s “stowaways” on her farm half a world away from Scotland.

Islands offer unique experiences, and Kangaroo Island, slightly smaller than P.E.I., is no exception. It is a popular tourist destination known for its wild landscapes, fresh food, agriculture and native park lands. 

A native Islander, Bussenschutt along with her husband Adam and their children manage 2,500 merino sheep, as well as two luxury “stowaways.”

“When I landed at Millar’s Hideaway Experience in Scotland during my Nuffield travels, I just knew it was exactly the kind of thing that I would love to create on our own farm,” she says.

“Creating a luxury, romantic couples break is at the heart of our business model, and we have worked hard to create a truly unique space, in a really cool location on a one-of-a-kind island.” 

“The unexpected upside of our new venture is that as farmers we have learned the true pleasure of making people happy not just by producing food and fibre but providing a one of a kind experience you can’t really find anywhere else.”

The Bussenschutts currently run two stowaways —The Nest and Sleepy Hollow — and like Millar’s hideaways, they are rated five stars on Trip Advisor.

“I had an amazing time during my Nuffield travels and gained so much knowledge which has benefited my personal development and that of my family business beyond belief,” she says.

So what does a farm stay have to offer to the consumer to qualify for top-end accommodation fees? Millar conducted a survey with 200 of her own guests. Some of the results may surprise:

• The chance to escape the crowds, traffic, noise, to be alone and have space and fresh air.
• Starry skies, beautiful views, the natural environment, wildlife.
• Chance to wear coveralls, experience mud. 
• Somewhere to help you feel better mentally.
• The chance to meet a farmer for the first time, see crops growing, see animals up close and learn about where food comes from.
• An authentic experience — not a standardized corporate experience.
• Access to the best produce, e.g. locally farmed/produced eggs, steaks, jam.
• Local know-how about the best places to eat, walk, things to make a holiday special. 
• A farm tour, interested in geography, seasons, history, economics of farming.

Delivering a luxury farm product requires the greatest attention to detail. High-end consumers expect more, but farmers who can deliver that extra can benefit greatly.

Your field of dreams

Considerations for those looking to add an agri-tourism component to their farm

In Caroline Millar’s Nuffield report, entitled “Selling the Farm Experience,” she makes the following recommendations: 

1. There is a market demand for agri-tourism from the public, which is willing to pay for a chance to experience interaction with a real live farmer. 
2. The public is willing to pay for a chance to learn about how food is produced, the natural environment and life as a farmer. 
3. Unlike Italy, in the U.K. this tourism product has not been developed in a significant way. 
4. The successful key person in a tourism diversification was often not the farmer but a member of their family.
5. This person had particular attributes, most especially being a “people person.” 
6. If you don’t like people, stick to sheep. 
7. In terms of the impact on the farming family, successful farm diversifications: 
• used all forms of physical and human capital within the family to drive the maximum return on investment from their farming business.
• allowed multiple generations in a family business to live and work from the same fixed land asset.
• facilitated management succession in the farming business.
• generated increased economic impact in their rural economies. 
• collaborated with other businesses in a strategic way. 
8. Farm tourism and leisure present a significant opportunity for farmers to connect with consumers, to drive demand for homegrown produce for local and international markets, and to make vital income.

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