US organic dairy farm highlights authenticity with outreach strategy

San Francisco

JANA McClelland is a third-generation dairy farmer in Petaluma, California. This October, she expects 600 to 1,200 people to visit her family's farm. She plans to take them to the nursery, the milking parlour and the pastures. "We know people care where their food comes from," she said.

It is all part of an outreach strategy from Organic Valley, which bills itself as the largest cooperative of organic farmers in the US. Call it table-to-farm marketing.

These initiatives, which include a new website, are meant to cater to what the Organic Trade Association describes as people's increasing interest in "transparency in the supply chain and to know where food comes from". According to the trade group, sales of organic food and non-food products in the US climbed to US$44.3 billion in 2015 from US$40.4 billion in 2014, which represents the industry's largest dollar gain ever; US$39.7 billion of last year's total sales were for organic food. The association also said that organic food sales rose 10.8 per cent in 2015.

Organic food sales now make up almost 5 per cent of the food sold in the US. According to the trade group, millennial consumers, particularly in urban centres, are driving much of that growth.

Authenticity is "the biggest key for consumers", said Sarah Masoni, product and process development manager at the Food Innovation Center at Oregon State University. "They want to know who's creating their food. Consumers want to trust the suppliers of their food."

Organic Valley introduced its new website in April, with the goal of telling farmers' stories and, in doing so, personalising people's consumption of organic products. The group was careful to make the website mobile-friendly, a vital quality since people often employ their phones to do research and share information as they shop for food.

The site features a tool to help consumers identify local stores that carry Organic Valley dairy products, as well as stories about farmers - who belong to the cooperative - across the US, and more than a dozen recipes for dishes that contain Organic Valley products, with new ones added twice a year. There are also new product and recipe photos by Jody Horton, a James Beard Award-winning photographer.

Founded by seven dairy farmers in 1988 in La Farge, Wisconsin (population: about 750), Organic Valley now counts as members more than 1,800 farmers, mainly in the US. Of those, 1,456 are dairy farmers, 342 raise beef cattle and 174 grow produce. The members' total sales for 2015 reached US$1.04 billion.

About 40 per cent of the dairy produced by the cooperative is sold as bulk milk and other ingredients to manufacturers such as Stonyfield, while dairy products made by Organic Valley and carrying its brand are sold by retailers including Whole Foods Market, Costco, Walmart and Target, as well as by conventional grocery, convenience and speciality food stores.

The cooperative, which for many years invited retailers and others in the food industry to visit its members' farms, began offering free "farm discovery tours" to the public in 2014. This year it is offering four: in Kutztown, Pennsylvania and Kewaskum, Wisconsin, in June; in Enumclaw, Washington, in August; and in Petaluma, California, in October.

The June tours catered to visitors from New York City, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and the later tours are aimed at visitors from Seattle and San Francisco.

"For every person who goes there, they'll tell many of their friends, who will spread the word," Ms Masoni said. "Conversation will happen across communities."

Farm visits also are central to Organic Valley's new social media efforts. The cooperative invited so-called social influencers such as Eva Amurri Martino of Happily Eva After, Naomi and Josh Davis of Love Taza, and Naomi Robinson of Bakers Royale to participate in the Kutztown farm tour last month, and it plans to work with others in the future.

The hope, according to Karen Zuckerman, chief creative officer of the agency HZDG, which worked with Organic Valley on its marketing strategy, is that the influencers will share their experiences on the farm with their many followers on social media, who will then investigate organic farming for themselves. NYT