Crofter’s Gets Conventional Processors Out of a Jam—
and Into the Niche

By Sarah Fister Gale


Crofter’s Organic makes of a line of fruit spreads using a combination of simple recipes and complex rigorous testing procedures to produce some of the most flavorful and reliable products in the organic industry. The Canadian-based company produces more than a dozen spreads in a variety of flavors, including Peach Passion, Wild Blueberry, Morello Cherry, Blood Orange, Blackberry and Mango, along with traditional Strawberry, Raspberry and multi-fruit flavors. It sources fresh fruit from all over the world, avoiding fruit concentrates whenever possible in order to produce an authentic, natural-tasting product that puts conventional jams to shame.

Not only is the company noteworthy for its great-tasting spreads but Crofter’s Organic is also on the cutting edge of food safety in organics, boasting a well-developed Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) program led by John Warner, Crofter’s lab manager and quality control specialist who is also a certified organic inspector. Under Warner’s guiding hand, Crofter’s has received organic certification in several countries, enabling it to import ingredients and export products worldwide. Along with its U.S. National Organic Program (NOP) certification, Crofter’s holds Japan Agricultural Standard (JAS) certification, which allows it to sell products in Japan, and European Union (EU) certification for European sales. When it purchases ingredients from countries without stringent organic controls, it works with individual farmers and brokers to ensure its procedures meet or exceed the standards set by the NOP.

Its dedication to quality, food safety and product excellence has won Crofter’s several major co-packing and private label clients, establishing it as one of the big players in the small but growing world of organic products.

Good Taste is Hard to Come By
Sample one of Crofter’s spreads, and it’s like eating a garden grown tomato for the first time—you had no idea jam could taste this good. The rich, sweet and powerful flavor of Crofter’s products surpasses most fruit spreads on the market today, leaving consumers to wonder how they could ever go back to conventional jam, thick with emulsifiers and synthetic flavor. Crofter’s spreads are good enough to make any organic shopper ponder whether organic might not just be better for them, but better tasting as well.

How does Crofter’s pack such powerful punch into its products? The founder, Gerhard Latka, took a radical approach to formulating his jams—he uses real fresh fruit, and little else. Latka grew up in Germany working in his family’s flavor processing house where he learned how to extract flavors from natural ingredients instead of relying on synthetics. “The best flavors come from nature,” he says. “Why would you want to use chemicals to make something taste natural, when the real thing is available?”

Latka left his family’s business in 1989 while in his 20s, moving with his wife to Canada with the dream of starting their own business. “Green Gerhard,” as his father called him, was committed to producing and eating only natural foods. When he arrived in Parry Sound, Ontario, he was determined that his new company would focus on making organic products. Because the flavor business is hard to gain access to in a new market, Latka took his skills and experience in a different direction. He wanted to produce something simple and elegant, so he began with jams and juices. “They are straightforward products,” he says. “They are simple to make and the methods are not so different from flavors.”

Even with great recipes and a lifetime of experience, Latka discovered the world might not be as ready for organic foods as he was. “We tried to be as organic as we could without losing our shirts,” he chuckles, referring to his early years in business. At the time, in the early 1990s when the market for organics was still quite small, that was a challenge. “There weren’t a lot of outlets for organic products back then.” But Latka persevered. He outsourced the juice line production, and later sold it to Clement Pappas in 2004, but he did all jam production in-house.

The company struggled initially to find its niche in the marketplace, but now it is one of the most well-established jam makers in the organic industry. The name may not be familiar, but Crofter’s spreads have been a staple on natural and organic food shelves in the U.S. and Canada for years under private label names. “We don’t have much brand identity,” Latka admits. “We’ve never been the most brilliant marketers for the Crofter’s brand, but we do so much private label packing that we are actually one of the largest organic manufacturers in North America.”

The company produces only fruit spreads, 98 percent of which are certified organic. Last year, Crofter’s produced 3 million cases of jam, and Latka expects to grow to nearly double that amount in the coming years.

HACCP Gives Crofter’s an Edge
Besides being organic, Latka was determined to create a facility that adhered to the highest standards for excellence and food safety, and John Warner became his food quality champion. He met Warner in 1990, where he was working at Canada’s Center for Toxicology and doing organic farm inspections for Quality Assurance International (QAI) and the Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA). Warner had a similar commitment to high standards. “If you are going to take the trouble to grow organic fruit, you want to maintain the character and quality of the food,” he says. Latka immediately hired him to set up Crofter’s in-house testing laboratory and to develop a quality control system for the processing facility. Within a few years, Crofter’s was well enough established to bring Warner on full-time.

One of the biggest obstacles Warner initially faced was to create a facility that met the needs of all the countries with which Crofter’s does business. Even though Canada doesn’t have a formalized organic certification program, Warner and Latka strived to create a facility that met the high demands of the EU, the U.S. and Japan, especially with regard to pesticide residue on raw ingredients. “Most countries say organics can have zero to five percent of the residue allowed on conventional products,” Warner notes. “But you can’t detect residue at that level, which basically means if you find any residue it’s too much.”

To meet the pesticide guidelines of its trading partners, Crofter’s goes to great lengths to ensure the cleanliness and quality of its fruit. All raw ingredients are preprocessed, having been washed and cleaned to remove any potential residue, before they arrive at the facility. Warner’s team does a pesticide scan of every batch of fruit, taking a representative sample with a gas chromatograph to test for residue. The gas chromatograph can compare discrepancies between the naturally-occurring chemicals in fruit, such as cherries, and unnatural occurrences that indicate a chemical presence by comparing baseline readings. “That gives us a picture if anything in the fruit is suspicious,” he says.

In his history at Crofter’s, Warner has only seen six suspicious readings and all of them ultimately came back negative for chemical residues. Even so, Warner sees his rigorous testing procedure as critical to meeting the quality expectations of the Crofter’s team and its clients. “Fifteen years ago all the organic companies were small independent firms, but as the industry grows there is more competition. There’s a bigger chance of mistakes or intentional sneaking in of nonorganic products, so we will always double check,” he says. “It’s our responsibility to protect our clients.”

Pesticide testing is part of Crofter’s overall HACCP program, which was officially certified in December 2004. The HACCP system employs on-site monitoring of preventive or control measures and prompts corrective actions at food plant operations (or critical control points [CCPs]) where food safety hazards are likely to occur and where risks of these are high. The seven basic principles of HACCP are well-established, and the model can be customized to apply to the control of biological, chemical and physical hazards that are likely to occur in any given food production operation (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Under HACCP, food processors implement process controls at each critical step in food production, from the raw material to the finished product, to prevent, reduce or eliminate food contaminants.

Warner was trained at the University of Guelph in the principles of HACCP, taking a number of courses on setting up, auditing and documenting the program, as well as learning how to teach the principles to the rest of the staff. He was also familiar with HACCP from his days as an organic inspector.

“A lot of HACCP is good recordkeeping and administration,” he admits. And although it adds work to the process, Warner believes that HACCP is easier for organic companies to achieve then conventional ones. “Organic companies don’t work with chemical cleaners or additives, and not many allergens, so there are fewer nasty things that need to be controlled,” he points out. They are also following many of the same procedures to meet their organic certification requirements. “Many organic critical control points are the same for HACCP.”

Big Business Behind the Scenes
Even though HACCP may be a natural next step for organic processors, it is still a new concept for many in the organic industry, which gives Crofter’s a competitive edge. “HACCP is the forward edge of organic,” Warner says. As the demographic of organic shopper grows in North America, large conventional processors are interested in building organic lines. They are turning to companies like Crofter’s to build co-packing relationships because they have similar processing standards. “We are further ahead in quality control, HACCP and Total Quality Management (TQM) than a lot of organic companies and that plays a role in winning clients,” Warner says. “We meet all of the standards established by conventional processors. When potential clients see we have a HACCP program, they know our quality control processes are up to snuff.”

It may not be the sexiest way to get established, but co-packing allowed Crofter’s to grow and prosper with a minimal investment in marketing. “Developing an organic brand can be a brutal business,” Latka says, especially 10 years ago when most mainstream grocers wouldn’t have given him the time of day. “We didn’t have the money to spend on shelf space and advertising. That’s what the big boys do.”

Instead, he helped many of the large mainstream manufacturers develop their own signature organic lines using Crofter’s product and their own custom labels. It’s an ideal situation, according to Latka. For a large processor, it’s not cost-effective to launch an organic brand internally because it requires too many changes for too little profit. “The big processors aren’t equipped to produce a niche organic line on the smaller volume to meet the needs of the market, but Crofter’s is.”

Latka estimates that his company is 10 to 20 times smaller than an average large-sized conventional manufacturer, and the volume of organic jam they want to produce is 10 to 20 times less than what they make for their mainstream product lines. “A big company is not interested in producing a line that only requires 15,000 cases of product, but that’s exactly our production capacity. It makes us a giant in organics because that’s all we do.”

Sourcing Around the World
To meet the needs of its growing client list, the Crofter’s team discovered early on they could not source ingredients locally. “We tried, but most local farmers were only doing five or 10 acres,” Warner says. In Ontario, most of the organic farms are small and there is no infrastructure to support the picking and processing of the fruit. Crofter’s does get all of its wild blueberries from Quebec but the rest is sourced from around the world, which creates another set of issues. “Any raw material we use has to be NOP-certified to sell in the U.S.,” Warner points out. “That can be a challenge.” It means when they buy fruit from Europe, it needs both EU and NOP certifications. He also sources a lot of fruit from Serbia, Chile and other countries without strict organic standards, creating quality control issues.

To reduce concerns, Warner tries to work directly with the farmers instead of brokers to gain more control and oversight over the products. He visits growers’ farms and evaluates their processes. “The visits help us with quality control and the farmers take us more seriously,” he says. He also does formal audits of all suppliers, evaluating their recordkeeping, personnel training and expertise. “We put a lot of emphasis on interviews with new suppliers. It’s all part of our HACCP program and our NOP certification.”

It’s this complex web of requirements that keeps Warner on his toes, trying to meet the needs of his international network of supply and demand, but he’s cautiously optimistic about the future. “Sourcing has gotten easier than it was 10 years ago, and maybe eventually there will be a standard we can all use,” he says. “Although,” he adds, “I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.” Until then, Crofter’s Organic will continue its forward-thinking approach to locating the highest quality fruits that can be certified to the company’s—and its customers’—rigorous quality control, safety and certification standards.

Sarah Fister Gale is Editor of Organic Processing Magazine. She can be reached at sarah@organic processing.com.