Area food producers are finding new ways to get their fruits and vegetables, pasta, breads and meat to people’s tables long after farmers markets have packed away their stands for the season.
Restaurants and customers who participate in CSAs, community supported agriculture, buy directly from area farmers and ranchers. Denver-area producers are also reaching more people through the online grocer Pinemelon, which promotes “local first,” and Spade & Spoon, a meal-in-a-box service that uses locally produced food.
Joy Rubey founded Acme Farms & Kitchen, a meal-kit service, in Washington state in 2011 after her husband quit working in architecture to take up farming. She started Spade & Spoon, a Colorado version of the business, in 2022.
“It just seemed like an uphill battle for farmers, and so I was trying to think of a way to help my husband to move more local food and help the farmers around him,” Rubey said.
Her idea was to offer meal kits using locally produced food. Acme started with about 20 producers and now works with approximately 80. Acme had reaped a total of $26 million in sales by August of this year.
In Colorado, Rubey’s goal is to move $5 million in locally sourced food during Spade & Spoon’s first two years of operation. The business is working with roughly 35 producers, a number Rubey expects to keep growing.
“I expect that we’ll see double the revenue and double the team size in the next five months” in Colorado, Rubey said.
Pinemelon, based in Denver, has seen a lot of growth since starting operations in 2022. The online grocer, which emphasizes local products, fills an average of 120 orders a day, offers more than 6,000 different items and in a typical month serves about 3,000 unique customers, said Connor Herrick, the company’s chief business development officer.
Herrick declined to disclose Pinemelon’s sales figures, but said they grew 50% year over year in October. The company plans to open a second location in Portland, Ore. Pinemelon delivers groceries daily and has three customer service representatives on duty every day to take calls.
About 35% of Pinemelon’s offerings are local, including food from farmers and ranchers, produce from the Western Slope, locally made pasta, bread, sauces, jams and frozen meal trays. The goal is to have more than 70% of the items come from local sources.
Emma Alanis, who heads the grocer’s local partnerships, said selling through Pinemelon saves producers from having to make their own deliveries. Alanis said the delivery logistics and marketing were her biggest problems when she was farming.
Let’s make a farm
Nick Millisor said he and the other founders of Ullr’s Garden initially took on marketing and delivering the lettuce, basil and arugula they grow hydroponically in freight crates in southwest Denver. “It was like us hitting our heads against a brick wall,” he said.
Nick, his brother, Luke Millisor, and cousin, Ian Randall, now sell about 60% of their goods through Pinemelon. Their produce is delivered in refrigerated trucks. Ullr’s Garden also sells its produce through CSAs and restaurants.
Randall said trying to sell through grocery stores “is a real hurdle for local producers.”
“The grocery stores say they’ll let you in, but there’s so much red tape,” Randall said. “Pinemelon is actually doing it.”
Teaming up with the online grocery platform has helped Ullr’s Garden reach more people. The Millisors and Randall started the company about a year and a half ago. They named it after the Norse god of skiing, winter and hunting. The name is a nod to the Millisors’ hometown of Breckenridge, which has an annual Ullr Fest.
Nick and Randall were both working in real estate and Luke was a manager of a neuroscience lab at the University of Colorado in Boulder when they shifted to agriculture. Nick began pondering the effects of climate change and how to respond in the summer of 2021. That summer, Germany was hit with intense flooding, droughts caused food shortages and 1 billion sea animals were cooked to death in the ocean during record-breaking heat in the Pacific Northwest.
The idea of growing lettuce and other greens to feed the community while using processes that consume 95% less water than traditional agriculture clicked with Nick. He didn’t have to work hard to convince Luke and Randall to join him.
“I was in academia a long time, working in research. And then Nick came to me and went, ‘I want to make a farm. I want to do a hydroponic farm.’ And I was like, “That sounds like fun,'” Luke said.
The three found a lot that was zoned industrial, commercial and agricultural. Randall said the 7,500-square-foot site had been used for cars and the trio spent thousands of dollars on cleanup and soil testing. The first winter they didn’t have running water, heat or a bathroom.
The three have learned on the go, Nick said. They are growing different kinds of lettuce as well as basil and arugula year-round in two freight crates equipped with the systems designed to grow plants. Luke’s science background has been a big help, Nick said.
Each crate can grow the equivalent of 3 to 5 acres of food, Randall said. The team plans to add more crates, likely stacking some on top of each other, to reach the goal of producing the equivalent of 40 acres.
Another goal is to also help feed communities that don’t have access to fresh produce, Nick said. The hope is to add a food stand on the site where other local producers could sell their items.
Filling the gaps
Jesse Albertini launched her new career soon after her daughter was born and about the time the coronavirus pandemic started.
“I had been working on a business plan for a really long time,” said Albertini.
She worked for several years as a chef in such restaurants as Oak and Jovanina’s Broken Italian and worked for Catering by Design. She wanted to try something else in the culinary field. In 2020, she started making pasta from local heirloom and heritage grains that are stone milled.
Albertini also makes stuffed pasta and sauces. She tries to get as many of her ingredients as she can from local farmers, ranchers and food makers. She uses freshly milled grains from Moxie Feed and Seed in Boulder.
“I’ve always enjoyed making anything where it’s taking something humble like grains and water and turning it into something delicious and hearty,” Albertini said.
She moved her pasta-making from a shop in her home to a commissary kitchen she shares with three other businesses. She named her business Sfoglina, which refers to a woman who hand-rolls pasta.
Albertini sells her different kinds of pasta online, to area restaurants, farmers markets — and now through Spade & Spoon. Rubey, the CEO and founder of Spade & Spoon, contacted her after buying her pasta at a farmers market about a year ago.
“The timing was perfect,” Albertini said. “It really helped me last winter because I have quite a few regular restaurant accounts now, but then I only had one that was every once in a while.”
Selling her goods through Spade & Spoon helped fill the gaps after farmers market season closed, Albertini said. She figures the meal-kit service generates about 20% of her business.
Rubey said customers can subscribe to the meal service or buy boxes when they want. They can get curated boxes or build their own. The meal kits are packed with local produce and recipes written by a team that works for Spade & Spoon.
“We create two to three new recipes every single week. We’ve been doing that for 12 years so we have a lot recipes,” Rubey said. “If something doesn’t have a minimum number of orders on the first time, then it’s gone.”
Albertini said she ordered some meal kits to try them out. “The recipes are delicious. The first thing I did when I started working with them was to get a bunch of boxes to make sure. I was really impressed.”
Spade & Spoon posts a menu and closes orders Thursday night.
“So Friday morning, they’ll give me what their orders are and they’ll usually pick it up Monday or Tuesday,” Albertini said.
Most of the meals provide four servings, Rubey said. Many people order three meals per week, spending $100 to $120. Those three meals will typically include food from a total of 12 to 15 local producers.
“That’s a big impact to small producers,” Rubey said.
She sees providing more avenues for local producers as a means to support small businesses, increase customers’ access to fresh food and build a more resilient food network.
“In the end, if we can build stronger regional food systems and people can do what I’m doing in multiple communities across the U.S., then we’d have a lot more food security and a lot better food being consumed and being grown,” Rubey said.
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