Wildwood Harvest Foods
Keeps on Trucking

By Sarah Fister Gale


Getting organic products to market while they are still fresh is like an episode of Beat the Clock. Without preservatives to lengthen shelf life, every hour counts in the safety and salability of organic products, especially for businesses like Wildwood Harvest Foods that are trying to expand into new markets. Wildwood, the Watsonville, CA-based maker of tofu-based products, began as a tiny one-man operation in the early 1970s but has since become an icon in the organic tofu industry, offering a variety of products, from braised tofu and tabouli to organic vegan spreads. It is considered the category leader in the West, according to SPINScan research, holding 45% to 60% of the market for tofu burgers and baked tofu.

Wildwood co-founders, Billy Bramblett and Jeremiah Ridenour, attribute their popularity with organic consumers and ability to expand to many factors, including great taste and good timing. But they also admit to discovering the secret to maximum shelf life—Wildwood runs its own fleet of refrigerated delivery trucks. Emblazoned with the Wildwood logo, the trucks pick up products as soon as they are ready and deliver them two to three times a week, ensuring that every Wildwood product is fresh and front-and-center on grocers’ shelves.

While most small companies hire distributors for deliveries, Wildwood maintains more than a dozen trucks that take products to market as soon as they are produced. “Running our own trucks is like a business within a business,” says Alice Bourget, Wildwood’s marketing director “It’s expensive but worthwhile.”

By managing its own distribution, Wildwood guarantees products don’t languish in a warehouse, wasting valuable freshness while waiting to be shipped. It also ensures that the company receives priority treatment by staff drivers who play an important role in supporting and promoting the Wildwood Harvest brand.

Unlike traditional distributors who drop boxes of products and leave, Wildwood drivers cultivate relationships with store owners. They stock the shelves themselves, winning favor with grocers, who often don’t charge them slotting fees, and ensuring they grab the best spots on the shelves.

“They are like a mini sales force,” says Bourget. Along with stocking the products, the drivers, dressed in Wildwood shirts, make sure products are prominently displayed, put up point-of-purchase displays, and offer product demos in the stores to educate people about Wildwood products and the quality, health benefits and good taste of organic soy. “This is how we built our reputation,” she says. “It’s how we market ourselves.”

The trucks themselves, which are emblazoned with the Wildwood logo, also play a role in promoting the brand. Wildwood spends little money on marketing or ads, relying on the trucks to spread the word. “Our trucks are seen by millions of people in traffic every day,” Bramblett says. “It’s mobile advertising.”

A Rich History
But freshness and prominent shelf space didn’t win Wildwood its legions of devoted fans. The overall success of Wildwood, Ridenour says, lies largely in the fact that their products taste great. “The tofu salads, marinades, and other products are firm, fresh and taste good,” he says. They also come in many styles and spices to please the taste buds of all kinds of consumers. For example, the baked tofu is offered in a mild savory, traditional teriyaki, spicy Thai and a sweeter Aloha. Likewise, they offer four flavors of hummus, as well as baba ganooj, taboleh, and three flavors of organic Aioli mayonnaise.

“The variety of our products gives us broad appeal,” he says. They’ve continued that commitment to flavor and freshness at a new cultured soy facility in Grinnell, IA, where a recent merger with an organic soybean farm, owned by their new partner Tom Lacina, enabled the company to add lines of cream cheese, sour cream, six flavors of soy yogurt and five flavors of soy smoothies. The new lines are gaining notice in natural and traditional markets across the country, allowing the West Coast-based tofu products manufacturer to expand the business—geographically, demographically and categorically.

Humble Beginnings, Great Growth
Creating a nationally recognized Wildwood brand wasn’t always important to Bramblett who began Wildwood in the 1970s. The blues guitarist, political activist and chef owned a vegetarian restaurant and nightclub called the Sleeping Lady where he made sandwiches and tofu in the back kitchen. His customers loved the fresh organic offerings so much that he opened a separate business in a health food store up the street. Every day he made ready-to-eat organic tofu products and vegetarian sandwiches and sold them out of the back of his station wagon to local natural food stores around the area.

“There was a growing demographic for ready to eat natural foods at that time,” Bramblett says. Interest was growing in vegetarian cuisine and organic alternatives, such as soy, were gaining notoriety as a healthy substitute to animal protein. Bramblett had the products in place to meet their needs.

He quickly expanded the business adding tofu salads, hummus, marinades and a whole host of other products to his line, which he delivered daily in the first Wildwood truck—a refurbished, air-conditioned vehicle that showcased the Wildwood logo. “Our products had such a short shelf life we had to drop them off two or three times a week,” he says. And so the tradition of personal deliveries and relationship-building began.

His commitment to freshness and constant face time won him strong ties with local businesses, and a permanent place on their shelves. By 1984, Bramblett bought more trucks, expanded his routes and was doing a million dollars a year in sales. He was also outgrowing his Fairfax kitchen.

Meanwhile Ridenour was busy 120 miles away in Santa Cruz, CA, experimenting with tempeh, a fermented soybean product made by the controlled fermentation of cooked soybeans with a Rhizopus mold. Ridenour, a tall lanky hippy with a degree in engineering and the voice of a talk show host, was channeling his own passion for organic foods into a business of his own. He had been experimenting with various flavors and textures for his tempeh, which he was trying to sell to local natural food stores. His business was on a much smaller scale than Bramblett’s at the time, but he was interested in expanding into tofu and kept running into Bramblett’s products.

“I’d try to get shelf space but it was either filled with Wildwood products or another shipment of Wildwood was due the next day,” he says. By that time Bramblett’s drivers already had strong relationships with store managers who reserved prominent shelf space for the popular line, making it difficult for Ridenour to muscle his way in.

Ridenour was so impressed with Wildwood’s foods and popularity that he contacted Bramblett to discuss a partnership. “There was instant synergy between us,” Ridenour says.

In 1985, they joined forces and built a tofu plant in Santa Cruz. Within a few years, they had 12 routes across California from Santa Rosa to Monterey. Along with their own fleet of trucks, they bean using several other distributors to deliver their products outside Wildwood’s core delivery area.

By the 1990s, their products were going out every day, reaching as far north as Seattle, south to San Diego and east to San Ramon. Not only were they placed in natural food stores, they were securing shelf space in traditional supermarkets, including 32 Safeway Stores on the West Coast. Wildwood expanded again, moving from Santa Cruz to a 22,000-square-foot facility in Watsonville, CA, where they further broadened the growing company’s product line, and moved the delivery hub of the company to San Raphael, CA.

Meanwhile, Back in Iowa
Around the same time, Tom Lacina was busy in Grinnell, IA, swearing off farming forever. Lacina grew up on his grandfather’s Iowa soybean farm like a typical farm kid, he says, gathering eggs and picking apples. “When I left for college I vowed never to return.” Instead he got a degree as a criminal attorney—but something drew him back. By the mid-1980s, he’d returned to Grinnell where he took a job in the city while running the family farm with his father. He was selling soy beans to Japanese firms but wanted to take the business in a different direction.

“Organic soy was growing in popularity as people were becoming more and more aware of the nutritional components of the food they were eating,” Lacina says. He liked the idea of eliminating chemicals from the growing process and the growing demand for organic soybeans ensured that he would have a market for his crops. “The farm had been organic until the 1950s, and my grandfather only used chemicals in moderation,” Lacina notes. He immediately stopped spraying his fields, and by 1998, the farmwas fully converted to organic production.

As an organic soy bean farmer, Lacina had always known about Wildwood, which by the late 1990s had a reputation as pioneers in organic soy. So in 2000, when he was having technical difficulties in his new facility, he went online to ask them for advice.

“We love connecting with farmers,” Bramblett says. When he read Lacina’s e-mail asking for help, Bramblett gladly reached out to him. The two men quickly bonded discovering their own synergies through a series of odd coincidences: They are both musicians, and both had wives named Alicia who are graphic artists. “There was a definite connection,” Bramblett says. Three weeks later, Lacina was on a plane to the West Coast to meet with Ridenour and Bramblett. A year later, the two companies merged.

Expansion Challenges Shelf Life
It was a perfect pairing—Ridenour and Bramblett were expanding their own line into soy dairy and needed investors. At the time, the Iowa legislature was looking to invest in value-added Iowa-based agriculture. With the merger, they were able to get a major investment from the government to expand the business. They built the dedicated cultured soy food plant on Lacina’s farm, which opened in 2002 and that makes only cultured organic soy products. The new facility gave them an edge over the competition because it was dedicated solely to producing organic soy dairy products, and it opened a new market to Wildwood in the Midwest.

“It was a huge jump for us,” Lacina says. “We were the only dedicated cultured soy facility in the U.S.” Typically, there is concern with cross-contamination issues with products processed in traditional dairy plants, adds Lacina. At the Wildwood Iowa plant, there is no threat of contamination and they can go from soy bean to yogurt in 24 hours, because everything is done on-site. This also adds to the company’s appeal for certain consumers who are highly allergic to dairy products or don’t want the products they buy to be in direct contact with dairy, he states.

But with the company’s growth came the challenges of maintaining freshness and shelf-life long enough for consumers to buy the products. “Shelf-life is always an issue, especially as we expanded the business,” states Bourget.” Recent tests have shown the yogurts and smoothies Wildwood makes at the Iowa facility have a 65-day shelf life, which gives them time to ship from Iowa to the West Coast and still maintain a reasonable sell by time, whereas the tofu has a shelf-life of 45 to 50 days, making long-distance deliveries challenging.

“Shelf-life will determine our success,” Bourget says. The company’s commitment to food safety through an aggressive food safety plan also has enabled the company to extend the freshness of its products. Constant examination of ways to improve the development process, such as by making the products colder faster and by scheduling shipping times as close to the day that the products are made, further helps to lengthen product shelf-life. “The food safety program makes such a big difference.”

The new plant in Iowa also helps Wildwood expand the brand’s reach. Even in refrigerated trucks, which are kept under 38F for the entire shipping process, the tofu products need to hit shelves fast while they are still fresh, Bramblett says. It’s made expansion to other markets challenging.

The Iowa plant gives distributors a stopover point for shipping, where they can restock and continue, helping to push the Wildwood brand further east. Today, they sell products in about 35 states including Hawaii and Alaska, and the goal is to have Wildwood in stores across the country by the end of 2004.

“Our mission is to nourish human health and well-being through the promotion of dietary and agricultural change,” Ridenour says.

The ability to expand and reach more consumers with fresh, high-quality organic products will help Wildwood Harvest Foods make that mission come true.

Sarah Fister Gale is Contributing Editor to Organic Processing Magazine. She can be reached at sarah@organicprocessing.com.