Southport Grocery & Cafe’s Good Food Awards Draw a Community
By Lorrie Baumann
Southport Grocery & Cafe offers its guests a seat at the table for breakfast and lunch as well as a few shelves of specialty groceries in Chicago, Illinois’ Lakeview-Southport Corridor on the north side of the city. The location is just two blocks from Wrigley Field. “That’s important because it brings energy to the neighborhood. We have a lot of people who come in before the game because they want breakfast before they go to the afternoon game,” said Lisa Santos, Southport Grocery’s Owner and Chef. “It’s a magnet. When they [the Chicago Cubs] are doing well, you just can’t beat it – it’s a nice add-on.”
The 2,500 square foot cafe seats customers at around 22 tables, which expands to 40 in the summer when an outdoor area is available. The menu emphasizes breakfast, but Southport also serves sandwiches and salads. “We kind of call our food ‘comfort food but with a little bit of a twist,’” Santos said. “It’s still approachable but something a little bit different.”
With a staff of 25, the cafe has full-time bakers who make most of its breads as well as a preservationist who makes the pickles and mustards. The specialty grocery shelves stock a carefully edited selection of candies and chocolates, pastas and sauces, pancake mixes, and some craft beverages. “We make some drink starters,” Santos said. “Craft cocktails are really popular right now.”
Santos curates the products in favor of small, local producers who make products that are different from what her own staff makes to sell. “I have to look at pricing and margin, but I do the first first – the taste, where they’re from,” she said. “If it’s really good and really special, my company will buy it.”
The neighborhood around Southport Grocery & Cafe is a family-friendly urban center with a mix of independent businesses along with some retail anchors, and Southport Grocery draws its clientele mostly from that immediate neighborhood. “Sometimes you look down the row along the banquette, and it’ll be all women and their kids,” Santos said. “Another day, it’s all men having business meetings.”
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After she’d finished culinary school, she started drawing up a business plan for a cafe of her own, but she got a little stuck on her first pass through it until her friend Darleen read through it and made a suggestion. “I couldn’t figure out how we were going to differentiate ourselves from other businesses,” Santos said. Then Darleen pointed out to her that she had noticed that when the two of them went on business trips together, Santos had wanted to spend some of the time they could spare away from conference sessions and appointments poking around in artisanal grocery stores. She suggested that what Santos needed in her plan was a few shelves for some artisanal grocery items. “It is true. I did not come up with it – she did,” Santos said. “It was really a way to differentiate against other restaurants.”
Something else that differentiates her business from most others is that Southport Grocery & Cafe has been winning Good Food Awards since 2013. With seven Good Food Awards already to its credit, Southport Grocery has two products among this year’s finalists for Good Food Awards, Backyard Relish and Bread and Butter Cauliflower. Past winners have all been for pickled and preserved products or for mustards, which are sold on the grocery shelves and served in the Cafe. “We wholesale a little bit to other small Chicago places,” Santos said. “We can pretty much sell what we make.”
She entered her first products into the Good Food Awards in 2013, when her preservationist at the time heard about the program. “The things that they stand for, we stand for as well,” Santos said. “It’s more ingredient-driven and sustainable practices-driven. That kind of production of foodstuffs reminds me of what my grandmother did.”
The awards matter to her customers as well as her staff, according to Santos. “People love the things that we preserve,” she said. “The Good Food Awards just give us a little bit more national recognition that we’re doing what we say we’re doing. It’s like street credibility.”
Participation in the Good Food Awards and in the Good Food Mercantile trade shows that are produced by the same organization, the Good Food Foundation, also gives Santos the opportunity to associate with like-minded people, and that’s helpful to her business as well, she said. “This business is hard. It’s the passion behind the products that gets me going, and when people love your products, it makes you want to keep doing it,” she said. “When well-known national people [like Alice Waters and Ruth Reichl] who have believed these things for so long – it just reminds you why you’re doing this.”
Ethiopian Coffee from Crimson Cup Named Good Food Award Finalist
By Lorrie Baumann
Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea’s Kossa Kebena is a finalist for a 2020 Good Food Award. Kossa Kebena comes from the Kebena Kossa farm in the Limmu Kossa district of western Ethiopia, and Crimson Cup sources the coffee through its Friend2Farmer direct trade initiative. The coffee is one of 403 products representing 42 states that were named as finalists this year from among 1,835 entries to the 10th annual Good Food Awards. Winners will be announced in January.
Kossa Kebena comes from a farmer who grew up in the coffee world and, as an adult, was able to obtain a piece of land and start growing his own with financing from Technoserve, a nonprofit organization that operates in 29 countries and works with men and women in the developing world to build competitive businesses. “His farm is in a preserved forest, called the Kebena forest. There’s no one there to exploit the minerals in the ground,” said Brandon Bir, Crimson Cup Coffee’s Director of Education and Sustainability. “There’s no commercial production in the forest other than coffee production, which is indigenous.”
Kossa Kebena is one of a long line of Ethiopian coffees recognized by the Good Food Awards. Bir explains the primacy of that coffee region in the competition by noting that arabica coffee is native to Africa. While coffee has been grown in Central and South America only since about 1800, African coffee farmers have been breeding and selecting seeds for their coffee trees for far longer. “The majority of heirloom coffee in Ethiopia has genetically worked itself out to be amazing,” he said. “Ethiopia is there because it’s just fantastic coffee that has worked itself out.”
The result, in the case of Kossa Kebena, is a coffee that’s naturally processed – dried on raised drying beds while the coffee beans are still clothed in the pulp that surrounds them in the cherry. In the cup, it has a syrupy body and tasting notes of bright fruit and sweet berries. “The cup itself is fruity but very clean for a natural-process coffee,” Bir said. In addition to the finalist recognition from the Good Food Awards, Kossa Kebena won a bronze medal at the 2019 Golden Bean North America roasting competition.
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“The market has changed in the last 10 years and so have we. We wanted to meet more producers, make more relationships because relationships are at the core of who we are,” he said. “Consumers have grown to appreciate more nuanced products, more conscious, intentional products. That intentionality has driven the coffee market to have more transparent coffee relationships. Consumers used to be specific about country. Now we talk about single farms. This is not Limmu region, Ethiopia. It’s a lot more specific, and a lot more intentional.”
Bir works with Crimson Cup’s Friend2Farmer program, started seven years ago as a way to connect the company directly with farmers and to help them grow better coffee so the farmers can earn premium prices without working through conventional certification programs, which often focus on their own particular objectives rather than on the needs that the indigenous growers identify for themselves, Bir said. “We’re very adaptive. A lot of certification programs have a certain protocol, maybe an emphasis on bird-friendly, some that focus on clean water, some that focus on social good,” he said. “We don’t know what different regions need, so we just ask. We’ve done everything from clean water projects, building a Specialty Coffee Association campus in Peru, quality control lab in Uganda, computers for students in Honduras. We’re adaptive, and that’s what makes us different.”
Another thing that makes Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea different is its unique business model that’s focused on helping other entrepreneurs start and grow their independent coffee houses. Not long after founding Crimson Cup in 1991, Greg Ubert, who is still the company’s President, realized that his real goal was in sharing his knowledge about how to build a successful coffee shop so they could be good customers for Crimson Cup coffee. He wrote a book called “Seven Steps to Success in the Specialty Coffee Industry” as a handbook for coffee shop start-up and operations. “That established our model of how we wanted to help people with retail expansion,” Bir said. Today, more than 200 entrepreneurs in 38 states have bought the book and used it as their blueprint to start their own coffee businesses through the company’s Power of the Cup® retail support program. “They buy the book, attend classes. Unlike a franchise, we will do the training, help with site selection, help with menu design,” Bir said. “We don’t have a franchise fee. If our partners are successful, then we’ll be successful.”
Crimson Cup’s Kossa Kebena coffee is available both to retailers partnered through Power of the Cup and to others. For more information, visit www.crimsoncup.com.
Silver Fern Farms Launches into American Meat Market
By Lorrie Baumann
Silver Fern Farms is launching into the U.S. market with a range of grass-fed beef, lamb and venison products in exact-weight vacuum-sealed packaging, that provides the grocer with 20-25 days in the store’s meat case. Packages are clearly (and proudly) marked with the meats’ New Zealand origin, and early next year they will include a code that allows consumers to trace the product back to the farms where the animal was raised. “We have supply chain traceability all the way from the farm to the retailer customers,” said Matt Luxton, Director of Sales, USA for Silver Fern Farms. “There’s lots of companies in the U.S. that buy from everyone and put it into a retailer program. We pride ourselves in having that connection all the way through to the retailer.”
Silver Fern Farms will be supporting the retail roll-out in the first quarter of 2020 with a social media campaign that targets the conscious consumer as well as marketing collateral to assist the retailer that includes recipe fliers, shelf strips and promotional posters. Promotions and sampling programs are also included. “We have to make sure we help the retailer sell the product,” Luxton said. “We’re telling them [through the social media campaign] the story about water reduction, plastic use reduction, environmental standards, animal welfare standards. We know we’re doing a good job there, and we like telling the story.”
The meat inside the Silver Fern Farms packages comes from all over New Zealand, which assures that supply will be available year-round. “New Zealand has a very temperate climate, we have got the ability to have a year-round supply, as opposed to being under three feet of snow,” Luxton said. “If there’s a drought somewhere, 90 percent of the country isn’t having a drought.”
Animals graze on grass year-round, and their harvest involves minimal stress for them because their pastures are close to the processing facility. “The maximum trucking time in New Zealand is about two hours,” Luxton said. Primal cuts are shipped from New Zealand to the U.S. with a shipping time that averages about 3.5 weeks. During that time, the meat is stored in optimal condition for aging, according to Luxton. “The eating quality at the end of that process is better than when it comes out of the plant,” Luxton said.
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Once the meat has arrived in North America, it’s cut and packaged in one of three processing facilities in which Silver Fern Farms is a partner. “We believe that we’re at the top of the game with regards to food safety and product safety. We can get 112 days on our expiry on product coming out of our plant. We’re able to ship it to the U.S., process it and still provide 25 days after processing in the U.S.,” Luxton said. Silver Fern Farms retail partners are already auditing the plants, and that audit data is also available to future retail partners, he said.
Silver Fern Farms can also guarantee to retailers that their consumers will be getting a consistently great eating experience from the company’s meats, although the grading system that the company uses in New Zealand is a little different from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s grading. “In essence, we grade similarly to what the U.S. does. It’s a little more mathematical,” Luxton said. He promises that the steak that consumers get when they buy a package of Silver Fern Farms meat will be no different from the steak that the retailer sampled when he was making the decision to carry the product in his case. “You lose grass-fed customers when they get a bad experience,” he said. “We want to hold onto all of those people who are trying grass-fed meats for the right reasons.”
Retail packaging for the company’s products comes sleeved in a colorful design that includes the information that consumers want to know about the meat they’re buying. The country of origin is clearly marked on the front, as is the package weight, the cut, the number of pieces included inside and the number of servings it will provide. The back of the package has recipes and directions for cooking, and the clear instructions and clarity on cooking times will appeal to the consumer who might be more familiar with meal kit cooking than with planning a meal from scratch.
A QR code also provides transparency about the farms where the animal was raised. “It’s giving them a clear picture of what we do,” Luxton said.
