Big Flavor in Tiny Batches

By Sarah Fister Gale


From sourcing organic beef and chicken by the truckload, to creating restaurant quality foods for retail and food service, Fairfield Farm Kitchens has overcome seemingly impossible dilemmas to launch a new line of organic entrees that promises to change the way consumers think about frozen foods.

Anyone who’s ever eaten a frozen entrée, knows that, generally, you sacrifice taste for convenience. However, Norman Cloutier, chairman and founder of Fairfield Farm Kitchens had the audacity to question this long held belief, says Frank Carpenito, CEO of the company. “He felt strongly that we could create chef-quality organic foods that consumers would love.” It was a simple notion that became the foundation for a production strategy that blossomed into a multi-million dollar business.

In the three years since starting the company, Fairfield Farm Kitchens has launched the Organic Classics line of organic baked goods, soups, chili, and chicken and beef frozen entrees. It is also producing a line of organic vegetarian heat-and-serve frozen entrees and refrigerated soups in partnership with one of the most famous names in vegetarian and organic cooking—Moosewood.

From Chowda to Chicken
Cloutier has been a pioneer in the natural and organic foods industry since the mid-1970s. He founded United Natural Foods in 1976, a small specialty food store in Rhode Island that evolved into a wholesale operation, ultimately becoming America’s largest distributor of natural and organic foods.

In 2001, frustrated by the lack of quality and variety in finished organic products, Cloutier decided to get into the manufacturing business. He bought a 200,000-square foot co-packing manufacturing operation and converted it to a facility capable of producing frozen organic entrees, soups, sauces, and baked goods for food service and retail. “The theme would be chef-quality products made in small batches that would maintain their homemade flavor and appearance,” Carpenito says. “It was his vision.”

That was the beginning of Fairfield Farm Kitchens. Cloutier’s long-term goal was to establish the company as a premium brand, then build it into a predominantly organic entity. In early 2002, he bought the manufacturing division of Boston Chowda Co., a Boston, MA-based soup processor and restaurant chain famous for its award-winning clam chowder, as well as a line of soups, chilis and stews. The line was not organic; however, it put the company in the realm of high-end foods, giving it credibility with high-end consumers, Carpenito says.

Three months later, the new facility was certified organic by Quality Assurance International (QAI), and Fairfield launched the Organic Classics brand with a line of four frozen toaster muffins and six organic chicken entrees—Cajun Style Chicken Tetrazini, Chicken Cacciatore, Chicken Marsala, Hearty Chicken and Vegetable Stew, Chicken with Honey Barbeque Sauce, and Thai Style Chicken Curry.

The Fairfield chefs had been working on the new formulas for months, identifying recipes that would freeze well, taste great, appeal to consumers, and utilize ingredients that could be sourced year-round. The biggest challenge in that formulation process was finding an ample supply of high-quality organic chicken, says John Weaver, purchasing manager for Fairfield.

Initial research on consumer preferences showed that 86% of organic shoppers buy organic chicken every week, which is why Fairfield chose it as the primary ingredient for its first entrees. Despite some challenges, they were prepared for the sourcing intricacies that came with it.

“Organic chicken is popular, but it is not always easy to get,” Weaver says. The farms that were producing organic poultry were predominantly focused on pre-packaged retail sales in limited quantities. “They didn’t have the scale of production for commercial use, plus they got an additional margin for retail sales.”

Weaver worked directly with farmers and processors for several months, trying to reshape their mindset away from prepackaging 10 pounds of chicken for the local market and toward shipping him hundreds of pounds of chicken in bulk. It was a maddening process, until he received a call in early 2002 that solved his sourcing dilemma. Weaver had been contacting everyone he knew, hoping to cobble together a large enough poultry network to meet the needs of the new entrée line. At that same time, a large conventional chicken processor, frustrated with the highly competitive nature and limited margins of the chicken industry, wanted to convert to organic but wasn’t sure the market was there to support a transition. The processor heard about Weaver through the poultry grapevine and a partnership was born.

The processor now supplies Fairfield with thousands of pounds of chicken annually. This resource meets their existing ingredient needs, although Weaver admits he still regularly networks with other poultry providers to be sure he has a backup if supplies fall short.

Chef-Quality Cooking in 100-Gallon Batches
With the chicken effectively sourced, the team set to work finishing the recipes. Following Cloutier’s vision, the Fairfield chefs took different approaches to formulating recipes than traditional food technologists. Instead of starting in the facility and building the formula around the limits of large-scale production and freezing, the head chef took the process back to her kitchen. “We developed the recipes from a chef’s perspective, not from an industrial point of view,” Carpenito says. “If you are going to talk about a product being restaurant quality, you need to create it in a kitchen and replicate it in the facility. That way taste, flavor and texture are always primary.”

Once a recipe was perfected in the kitchen, the chefs’ team explored whether it could be reproduced with the same quality on a larger scale–and even then, they limited batch sizes to 100-to-200 gallons at a time instead of the 500-to-6,000 gallon batches typical of production facilities. To do that, they had to determine whether ingredients would be available year-round and what impact the production techniques would have on the flavor and texture of the final product.

To maintain the desired quality, they created recipes that are more complex than traditional frozen entrees. They have more ingredients, including concentrated flavors, such as sun dried tomatoes, dried shitake mushrooms, tamari soy sauce, and spices like chipotle pepper, rosemary, oregano, thyme and fennel.

The company uses fresh vegetables that are hand-cut in the facility to ensure they maintain their color and texture and are cut to the right size.

“If you take a spohisticated and complex recipe and use fresh ingredients, you’ll end up with a great flavor profile,” Carpenito says. “Fresh vegetables deliver the flavor and firm texture that frozen, dried or industrial ingredients just can’t match.”

New shipments of fresh produce arrive at least once a week, and every ingredient is used within 72 hours of its arrival at the plant. Fairfield also doesn’t premix its spices or sauces, preferring to do all ingredient blending on site.

“All of these techniques give us more control over every batch, which lets the quality come through,” Carpenito says. It’s a simple but time-consuming, approach to frozen food production but it’s how Fairfield maintains its quality standards. “Easy is not our top priority–taste is.”

Where’s the Beef?
Even after the formula is tweaked and the ingredients are sourced, making the finished products is never easy, adds Weaver. “Execution of this process is a day-to-day challenge.” The Fairfield team faces frequent obstacles, from making sure trucks arrive on time, to overseeing the quality and consistency of raw ingredients and praying that crops won’t suffer from an early frost.

“Conventional producers have far deeper resources than organic,” Carpenito points out. “But John (Weaver) spends a lot of time with farmers and distributors making sure we get the quality and quantity of ingredients that we need.”

Weaver’s experience in tracking down chicken helped him a year later when Fairfield prepared to add organic beef entrees to its Organic Classics line. “Making sure we had a good supply of beef proved to be more difficult than the chicken,” he admits. Adding to the difficulty of locating the scarce resource was a corporate policy that ingredients be sourced regionally whenever possible to reduce use of fossil fuels for shipping and to establish strong relationships with local producers.

There was a limited number of organic cattle and few certified organic processing facilities that could handle the large scale of production. “Most local organic herds processed one or two head at a time for local retailers,” Weaver says.

In the end, after dozens of phone calls, networking meetings with organic farming associations and visits to local farms, Weaver built a network of small farmers who together would pool their resources to provide Fairfield with the amount of organic beef necessary to meet its annual production needs. Weaver coordinates the beef supply through one large farm that processes the beef in its facility.

“As with the chicken, we discovered you can’t just rely on one source. You’ve always got to network,” Weaver says.

With the beef in place, Fairfield used the same formulation process, beginning in the kitchen and transitioning to the facility, to create and launch four new frozen organic beef entrees in the summer of 2004. The line includes Italian Style Meatballs, Macaroni and Meat Sauce, Meatloaf and Gravy, and Penne Pasta with Sauce and Meatballs, bringing the total number of products in that line to 14.

Two Visionaries Come Together
During the time that Weaver and the team of chefs was busy building the Organic Classics line, Cloutier established another partnership, with the Moosewood Collective, to meet the needs of non-meat eating customers.

The Moosewood Collective, which runs the famous Moosewood vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, NY and is releasing its eleventh pioneering vegetarian cookbook in the fall, was looking for a partner to launch a line of retail and food service products. Like Fairfield, Moosewood is staunchly committed to quality and excellence in every one of its hundreds of vegetarian and vegan recipes.

Originally, Moosewood had thought to launch the line itself, but after struggling to package and market its first line of organic salad dressings, they knew they needed help. “That was a hard lesson,” admits Wynnie Stein, a Moosewood chef and member of Moosewood’s board of directors. “Developing a product line is an extremely different business from running a restaurant. We knew we needed to partner with someone who understood the marketing and distribution side of the business.”

But the Moosewood team was cautious. “We had a lot of meetings with people over the years who wanted to work with Moosewood, but we always felt we hadn’t met our match,” she says—until they met Cloutier. He came to Moosewood in late 2001 for a casual meeting while visiting his son at Cornell University, which is also based in Ithaca. “We hit it off right away,” Stein says. “As human beings, we had the same values and he wanted to make excellent restaurant quality prepared foods.”

The Moosewood team had only recently begun seriously looking for a partner to do food service and retail, and although they’d met with a few companies, Fairfield was the first group they really felt a kinship with. “They were a true match for us,” Stein says.

The Moosewood chefs began working closely with the Fairfield team, touring the plant, learning the strategies and techniques of producing and packaging food in a large scale facility, and identifying challenges that would affect ingredient choices and cooking techniques. For example, the Moosewood chefs discovered that you can’t sauté in a processing kettle. “Fairfield gave us a mini course on food technology and how to tweak processing methods,” Stein says. “They were very patient, and let us learn from the bottom up.”

The Moosewood team then went back to their own kitchens, scouring their recipes to identify the most popular choices that would be suitable for a line of frozen and refrigerated products. “We wanted to start with comforting flavors, that were not too exotic,” she says.

They choose several soup recipes to begin with, and then began playing with them in the facility, tweaking the formula to meet their desired flavor profile. “Surprisingly, this process was similar to what we already do in the Moosewood kitchen,” Stein says. “Someone comes in with a recipe and we all work with it until we get it right.”

In January of 2003, the first line of Moosewood refrigerated vegetarian organic soups was released. The choices included Creamy Broccoli and Cheese, Creamy Potato and Corn Chowder, Hearty Mushroom Barley, Mediterranean Tomato and Rice, Tuscan White Bean and Vegetable, and Texas Two Bean Chili. These were followed shortly with a line of frozen vegetarian entrees, that now includes Moroccan Stew, Pasta e Fagioli, Southwest Cornbread and Red Beans, Broccoli and Pasta Parmesan, Farfalle and Spinach Pesto Sauce, Macaroni and Three Cheeses, and Spicy Penne Puttanesca.

Food Service Line Wins Big With Students
The Moosewood products were well received ealry on in the retail market, and by the spring of 2003, food service purveyors particularly for college campuses began requesting the line. Fairfield had planned to do a food service offering, but this was six to nine months sooner than they expected.

“The demand from colleges reflects younger consumers growing interest in organics and their expectation to have access to a wide variety of options,” notes Linda Davey, operations manager for dining service at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. Wellesley was one of the first campuses to offer the Moosewood line, after a “small but vocal vegetarian and vegan contingency began expressing concerns about the lack of healthy vegetarian options in the dining halls,” she says. Now the college has a vegetarian station in one of its halls that offers the Moosewood soups, along with organic produce, breads and other staples. The soups come frozen in gallon-size bags that are transferred to kettles, heated and served.

“The Moosewood soups are a great fit for us,” Davey says. “A lot of students aren’t vegetarian but they prefer them over our other soups because of their taste and because they are organic.”

Since launching the soups at Wellesley, Fairfield has replicated its entire organic line for food service and recently signed a deal with Aramark managed services to supply 19 soups, entrees and sauces for distribution to colleges, universities, and other food service operators. “Food service purveyors have never had access to full-fledged organic meals before now,” Carpenito says. “The reaction has been outstanding.”

He projects that organic food service will make up 10% to 20% of Fairfield’s business in 2004 and will continue to grow. “The demand for organic is definitely there,” he says, “especially among students. That young, educated demographic expects quality, healthy organic offerings, and the food service market is responding.”

Sarah Fister Gale is Editor of Organic Processing Magazine and Associate Editor of OP’s sister publication, Food Safety Magazine. Sarah welcomes reader input and feedback, and she can be reached at sarah@organicprocessing.com.