Country Choice’s Formula for Sweet Success

By Sarah Fister Gale


Country Choice Naturals founder Chuck Enderson calls himself a “product of the milling industry.” A farm boy from southern Minnesota, he spent most of his adult life working for food and agriculture businesses, including Cargill and ConAgra. Then, in the mid-1990s, the growing trend in organic cereals spurred him to blend his farm boy roots with his corporate experience by developing an organic cereal business. Country Choice Naturals was launched in 1997 as a privately owned start-up company in Eden Prairie, MN, just outside the Twin Cities. “I’d always had an interest in organic foods,” he says. “Growing up on a farm, I felt a connection to the land and it was a time in my life I thought, ‘If I don’t do it now, I never will.’”

The original plan was to focus the business on hot cereal and whole grain products. The business was quickly transformed, however, when a sweet idea for a sample platter caused an unexpected stir at a West Coast natural foods show. “While we were excited to introduce our first oatmeal products to market, we didn’t know how we were going to get people excited to try them.” Instead of handing out paper cups filled with tepid blobs of oatmeal, he hired a Los Angeles bakery to produce 50 dozen oatmeal raisin cookies, based on a friend’s recipe, and deliver them to the show. The response was swift and unanimous—soon all the cookies were gone. He made twice as many for a trade show six months later and ran out of the samples just as fast.

People didn’t just love the oatmeal, they loved the cookies. “We kept saying the cookies are so good because they’re made with Country Choice oats,” Enderson chuckles, “but people kept saying, ‘That’s fine, but these are some really good-tasting cookies.’” It was at this time, Enderson says, that the proverbial light went on.

Less than two years later, Country Choice Naturals introduced a four-item cookie line of its own. Sales were swift early on, and now seven years later, Country Choice Naturals has 18 cookies on the market—all certified organic—that are climbing the sales charts and giving their competitors a run for their money.

Good Taste is Easy to Recognize
At the heart of the company’s success, says Enderson, are two critical components: great tasting products and a consistent business plan. “From the start, we said if we were going to do certified organic products, they would have to taste good,” he says. He was frustrated by the long-standing myth that organic foods don’t taste as good as non-organic. “We would have to offer the market something that wasn’t already there; namely certified organic products with great taste.”

To ensure that every product met his high flavor standards, Country Choice was not about to rely totally on vendors to create the cookies. While many of its competitors farm production out to third-party manufacturers with the directive to “make me an organic cookie,” Country Choice strives to develop its recipes in-house. “So many new items hit the market every day and the failure rate is huge. To survive you have to win consumers over the first time.”

The company employs a full time in-house food technologist and quality control specialist to ensure that every cookie formula is outstanding. “We manage our taste profile very closely,” Enderson notes. While Country Choice does works with manufacturing companies to produce the cookies, these specialists partner with the vendor’s research and development department to jointly develop the best looking and tasting cookies.

And before any cookie hits the market, Country Choice’s employees do a lot of taste tests. Employees regularly sit around the office eating the latest cookie batches, and most importantly, bring them home to their kids. “Kids are our favorite customers,” Enderson says. “If they don’t like the cookie we revaluate the taste profile.”

When the company begins researching a new formula, Country Choice also doesn’t try to invent a cookie that’s never been done before. Instead, it identifies those products in the mainstream market that are most successful, and develops alternatives with the same high-quality taste in a unique organic formula. For example, sandwich crèmes are the best selling cookie in the traditional market, so early on Country Choice developed a line of organic sandwich cookies. Some have unique flavors, such as the ginger lemon and mint crème, while others, such as the chocolate and vanilla crèmes, mimic the traditional favorites in the market. “They all taste as good or better than their mainstream counterparts,” Enderson says proudly.

To support the segment of its core consumers, who buy organic because they have issues with food allergies, Country Choice later launched a line of wheat-free soft-bake cookies. “Trying to create a cookie without gluten that looks and tastes good had its own set of special problems,” he admits. The company spent many months creating and tweaking a formula, but ultimately brought a line of eight wheat-free products to market, including oatmeal chocolate chip, double fudge brownie, peanut butter, and ginger cookies. Consumer response has been so positive to the wheat-free line that Enderson has seen significant crossover from people who buy them just because the cookies taste good.

The Skills That Pay The Bills
Good taste alone, however, is not enough to guarantee the success of any business, Enderson admits. “The companies that have a good product and a good business plan are the ones that prosper.”

When he started Country Choice, the first thing Enderson did was to pull together a team of expert business people who came with skills they developed while working at other companies. “It’s great to have ideals but you’ve also got to have people with skills that are essential to running a company.”

Everyone on his team has a key part to play, he says, and they try to be supportive without interfering with each other’s roles. Working together, the team developed a vision for the business that they adhere to today—to deliver only great tasting certified organic products. “Any time a customer picks up a Country Choice Naturals product they know it’s certified organic,” he says. “We have done that to identify ourselves as the organic company.”

Having a good source of capital also is critical to any start-up company. Country Choice is fortunate enough to be able to fund its own growth internally, enabling it to expand at a rate that is suitable to the business—not to a group of outside investors. “A lot of entrepreneurial companies start with a great idea but they lack a solid capital base,” Enderson says. “They either starve to death or forfeit some ownership and control to generate that capital.”

Of course, Country Choice is still limited in how quickly it can expand. It doesn’t have the millions of dollars behind it that giant cookie companies have, so it can’t make too many costly mistakes. “You lose the show if you run out of money,” he says, “so we never get too far ahead of ourselves.”

But slow and steady growth seems to have worked for Country Choice. It’s seen 20% growth annually for four years and demand from the mainstream market has grown rapidly in the last three years. Country Choice Natural products can now be found in many major mainstream grocery stores, including Safeway, Cub, Kroger and Rainbow, along with most natural food stores, such as Whole Foods Markets and Wild Oats.

Fortunately, Country Choice has been able to keep up with demand. Holding fast to his original goal to reconnect with independent farmers, a large share of the company’s ingredients come from small family-owned growers, and Enderson says he has no problem scoring enough product to meet his needs. In the beginning, he admits, there was concern over whether there would consistently be enough organic raw material to support each new product, but that has long since changed. “If you work hard enough to build and support your supply chain you will find the ingredients to support your products,” he says. “We’ve gone well beyond sourcing problems as an industry.”

He attributes that in part to the development of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Organic Program (NOP) standards. While the paperwork, certification process and processing plant issues that go along with making certified organic foods creates the need for more control, Enderson says it’s worth the extra effort because of the credibility the NOP gave the industry. “Consumers know what they are getting and farmers can invest in organic commodities because they know there will be a market for them.”

And that market will surely include Country Choice cookies. “We want to be a player in this area of the food business for a long time,” Enderson says. “Our business plan is to grow within our means and keep the mistakes at a minimum. New products are the lifeblood of any food company and we are no exception. There are many more great-tasting products to come.”

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