It’s an unlikely connection with Zeringue Farms in Taft selling its locally grown satsumas for juice to a kombucha maker in New Orleans, but it represents the beginning of a farm-to-market strategy that could help grow an area food network.
“We are building the infrastructure of the future food system that will provide us safe and sustainable food,” said Sanjay Kharod, executive director of the New Orleans Food & Farm Network (NOFFN) that works in collaboration with St. Charles Parish in operating Edible Enterprise, a commercial incubator kitchen in Norco.
“We’ll start the New Year with the first value-added piloting of product,” Kharod said. “It’ll just be something we know will sell.”
The first value-added product for the pilot program will debut in January.
Which foods will be part of the network will depend on availability, although Kharod said it will likely include frozen juice that cold be sold to restaurants for sorbets or possibly a direct product to consumers.
Aimed at “supporting the building blocks of a new local food economy,” Kharod said the effort is aimed at fostering entrepreneurship and innovation in food production in an area he calls “the food shed,” including St. Charles Parish. The food shed map shows local food availability based on distance.
Kharod envisions an economy that has both local farmers growing food and food entrepreneurs making products from this local food. For every dollar spend on local product it generates another $1.50 in new dollars.
“The goal is to identify what’s being grown here locally – that the ideal,” he said. “I know there are farmers willing to sell things.”
An example is finding blood orange for a maker of drinking vinegars, Kharod said. Four potential suppliers have been identified in the area.
Zeringue Farms wasn’t selling satsumas until it connected to the kombucha (fermented tea) maker.
“That’s a sale the Zeringues would have never had,” said Kharod, who tasted the satsuma kombucha and enjoyed it.Rouse’s supermarket is among the buyers interested in locally grown food.
“They’re all about local,” Kharod said. “We’re lucky to have them interested in this. I think that’s going to be a wonderful development as we start growing.”
NOFFN also brought in the Food Science program of Our Lady of Holy Cross College to serve as a lab testing resource and a training center on production technologies at Edible Enterprises.
Most recently, NOFFN also incubated a small-batch, value -added food business to minimally process locally-grown vegetables for distribution to retailers and institutions and to provide small-scale food processing and co-packing services to food startups and farmers.
NOFFN was created more than a decade ago with the idea it would fill gaps in the local food system by helping build economically viable and sustainable pieces of this system.
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