Chuck Eggert

SIJ Q&A

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Name change a ‘natural’move for Pacific Foods All the doors are propped open and the sharp smell of roasted red peppers lingers in the air at the Pacific Foods process development building where CEO Chuck Eggert keeps his office. A food scientist and horticulturalist by training, Eggert says he prefers to work on product development and at the company’s 195-acre organic and transitional farms in Oregon. Pacific Foods began acquiring farmland five years ago and turning it over to what Eggert describes as “1900s style farming,” with a combination of cattle and crops, and an emphasis on cover crops and healthy soil. Going back to the roots of food and farm is at the core of Eggert’s vision for Pacific Foods. As the company unveils its new corporate identity, “Pacific Natural Foods,” and introduces a new line of chilies, stews and rice dishes, Eggert says he’s focused on retaining the company’s commitment to the earliest wave of natural food consumers. The name shift will make the company’s values and practices visible to all consumers, explains Kevin Tisdale, director of marketing. From expanding its farming operations to its in-house efforts to reduce landfill-bound waste, the company exudes pride about its evolving practices. While a technician experimented nearby with extracting the distinct flavor of roasted peppers, Eggert sat down to talk with SIJ about the company’s metamorphosis from Pacific Foods to Pacific Natural Foods. SIJ: Why have you decided to become Pacific Natural Foods? How have you changed what you’re doing as a company? Eggert: I don’t think we’ve changed anything we’ve been doing. At this point we’re probably 40 percent organic and 60 percent natural, and we felt this was a better representation. Our concern was that we started out as a natural food company and our core consumers have always been natural and organic. I don’t think we felt we were at the point we could take ‘Pacific Organic Foods.’ We’re not an organic food company. Not because we don’t want to be, but because it’s very difficult in a lot of the product categories we deal with to make everything 100 percent organic. Many times you can’t source enough ingredients. As we went along, we wanted to make a clear definition of who we were versus a lot of the more mainstream food processors talking about natural

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Sustainable Industries Journal

Celeste LeCompte

BY C ELESTE LE C OMPTE

Chuck Eggert said he finds new product inspiration by simply wandering around the greenhouse.

and organic foods. I think they’re adopting a lot more of the nomenclature. It’s unclear whether they’re adopting more of those practices or not. SIJ: So, how do you define natural? Eggert: When we first started doing our ‘Certified to the Source,’ we found a lot of ingredients where we were buying, were… Well, take natural honey. The natural supplier said, ‘Well yeah, it’s natural honey because it’s got honey in it.’ What they forgot to tell us is it’s got 90 percent high fructose corn syrup, and it’s because you couldn’t dry natural honey. So I think a lot of it is going back and asking the questions. When we look at our Certified to the Source, we’re up to about a five- to seven-page questionnaire. Before a supplier can sell to us they have to go through and answer all these questions. And then we put in all the little subtle questions like, What are your processing aids? What ingredients are you using to make particular flavors with? Someone could say it has soy sauce in it. Well, there’s all kinds of different soy sauce. We don’t just want to know it has soy sauce in it, we want to know what kind of soy sauce you used, because many times there’ll be what we consider nonnatural ingredients in the soy sauce.

We found that by asking the questions we can verify what we’re getting. Then, when we sell a product, we can tell people, when they ask us the questions, that we know the answers. A lot of it is it’s important to our customers, but it’s important to us because we use the products too. We want to know what’s in there. SIJ: Why is communicating your definition of natural to your customer base more important now? Eggert: I think when we started in natural foods everybody knew everybody. We were selling to the core natural foods consumer that shopped at a Nature’s, shopped at a Whole Foods. And people understood and asked questions. People knew who you were. And as our company has grown and our consumer base has changed, we felt it was more important to educate people about what some of these differences are. Also, there’s been a huge change in how people look at natural and how they look at sustainability and organic from when we started the company in 1988 to now. The more we can do to help explain that and help educate people helps us broaden our customer base. We’ve found that once people try an organic

SIJ Q&A

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food or try a natural food or understand the sustainable aspect of local farming versus importing products from around the world, there seems to be an awareness that continues to grow. That’s becoming a very important thing in people’s lives. SIJ: You have an emphasis on local farming and production right now. How is that changing as you become a national brand? Eggert: It’s kind of a conundrum that we face. We probably sell 60 percent of our products on the West Coast and 40 percent on the East Coast. And a lot of the projects we’re working on, with our flavors and with how we’re raising the products, are things that we think can be transferred to other regions of the country. So we try and design our formulas and flavors so they can be done in other regions. That’s something that’s going to be more and more important as time goes on. We’re working with packaging that is fairly minimal in the cradle-to-grave aspect. In a lot of our flavor development we’re doing the same thing — trying to minimize the steps it takes to make a product. Typically ... peppers would go from California to New Jersey, be made into a flavor that’s shipped back here to be put in a soup product that goes back there. Logic just tells you that these things need to be simplified. It’s easier if you’re just dealing with a local market, and it becomes more difficult as you ... get a broader base. So it’s a little bit of a conundrum. SIJ: As you expand your operations, do you think that you’ll have farms in other parts of the country as well? Eggert: We’ve gotten into farming as a way to understand the supply chain. What we’d like to do with our farms is start raising a crop, understand what we’re doing with the crop, and then create an open forum so that anyone else that we deal with can come and look at what we’re doing. We can say, ‘Look, you can farm this way ... You need to approach it with a different set of viewpoints. But you can actually make money doing it.’ So our goal isn’t to constantly expand our farms and farm everything ourselves. I think it’s really to be used as a model for other people. You have to take away the ‘This is how it’s always been done’ and look at it from the standpoint of what’s the most responsible way to do it, and what’s the most technically advanced way to do these things? And once you do them it’s amazing. They do work. But you do have to work at it. It doesn’t just happen. I think in agriculture in particular — and the same with food processing — it’s turned into ‘It’s just easier to put additives in,’ and ‘It’s just easier to put preservatives in and artificial colors.’ And

the irony is that simplicity is still the best way to do it. And it actually in many respects is the easiest way to do it. On almost any product development you can tell the age of the person doing the product development by how many ingredients they use. Someone that’s a food scientist that’s just out of school will come up with something with 30 different things in it. The person that’s been doing it here for a while will have five. So, a lot of our ... development is based on going back to classic techniques to make ... simple flavors. I think that’s our natural inclination, to simplify the number of steps to make a product. How can we make the flavor or minimize the number of components we have in our things? And I think that what we’re doing can make a difference. We can enjoy what we’re doing, and we can provide opportunities for people with what we’re doing. We can model to the community and other people that these things are doable and you don’t have to pay a premium to have local products.

“Once people try an organic food or understand the sustainable aspect of local farming, there seems to be an awareness that continues to grow.”

SIJ: How do you feel like you’ve been able to do that? Eggert: I should clarify that. I’m not saying that you’re not going to pay a premium compared to an existing product. But ... I think that as scale goes up and as the awareness goes up and people actually delve into the labels and the sourcing and what they’re buying, then it is a comparable shopping experience. Can you always find something cheaper? Yes. But that’s where you have to look back at the quality of the source and quality of the finished product. We always like to look at it from a label and ingredients standpoint. What are you actually buying? SIJ: You’ve talked about the importance of reading labels and knowing about the products you’re buying as a consumer. There are a lot of people who aren’t used to reading labels the way you’re talking about. How do you get past that, and do you think that’s going to change? Eggert: I think it will change. I think there’s a

need to do more education. We need to explain to people that on our ingredients statement there might be 10 to 12 ingredients, which is different than having to devote the whole back panel to the ingredients statement. We, for a number of years, were in the unique position that our consumers knew. I think the national statistic is 8 percent of the population has been in ... a natural foods store — a Whole Foods, a Wild Oats. So our consumer is 8 percent of the population currently, and we’re trying to reach out to the next 8 percent. We’re not trying to reach out to 100 percent of the population. It is a baby step; we’re not trying to do a Goliath leap. I think that we can accomplish two things. I think we can help expand our product line. But we can also help educate people, which helps our industry in total and develops a lot of the sustainability-type things. SIJ: Natural foods consumers are your base, but a lot of your efforts seem to be attempts to reach out further into the mainstream market. What does this mean for your future? Eggert: I think philosophically our No. 1 goal is to take care of the natural food consumer. Over the years we’ve seen a number of people that see the allure of mainstream, because it’s a much bigger market, and they forget who their core consumer is. We believe that if we meet the needs of our core consumers, it will just expand out as people become more and more aware of what we’re doing. Consequently, we’re not changing to meet the mass market; we’re letting the mass market change to meet us. We’re very careful when we expand our product lines and do other things that we’re not compromising our core values to get more business. But partially, the rest of the world seems to be changing and embracing a lot of these concepts that we’ve been working on for years. SIJ: Why? Eggert: I think there’s a realization that eating habits need to change, that people need to be more aware of what they’re eating, where it’s coming from. Obviously, local is better. But knowing, having a sense of confidence where your food is coming from, is really critical. I’ve always used the example that eating grapes in January isn’t particularly normal. There’s certain things you need to look forward to — grapes in August from California and Washington. It gives you a reason to be excited about something ... But it hasn’t hurt that people have learned how to grow organic food that doesn’t look strange anymore. G

Sustainable Industries Journal

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