The Name's the Thing

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Tuna%20loin.JPG Seth%20cuts%20tuna.JPG Lamb.JPG
FV St. Jude tuna, Chef Caswell, 90 Farms lamb

Branding food commodities: there's more to it than just providing a moniker. Ideally, the name should define the category. Chiquita means bananas, Kleenex means tissues, Xerox means to copy. Gucci and Gallo are instantly recognizable brands, and although you may not realize it, so are Camembert, Chianti and Copper River, else they'd just be cheese, wine and fish. Put a geographic label on the generic and you get something more valuable than a commodity, you get something specific--hence more valuable. Europeans have known this for generations, with AOC designationsin France and DOP labels in Italy, for example.

Our Puget Sound locavore movement is beginning to catch on. Take, for example, a 95-foot tuna boat owned by Joe Malley and his family, the FV St. Jude. Just one boat, but it's got its own website, tunatuna.com (what a great name!), a year-round presence at Seattle farmers markets, and a terrific story for these times: a low-mercury, sustainable troll fishery, both fresh and canned.

One early adopter of St. Jude tuna was Seth Caswell when he was the chef at Stumbling Goat Bistro (he's about to launch his own place, emmer & rye atop Queen Anne, and is also president of the Seattle Chefs Collaborative). At a Harvest for the Holidays dinner in Duvall last month for supporters of 21 Acres (the educational farming center in Woodinville), Caswell made a point of using locally sourced products, including St Jude tuna loin, cheese from Estrella Family Creamery in Montesano and lamb from 90 Farms in Arlington.

Estrella's made a name for itself, with some 20 cheeses produced from animals grazed on their own pastures. Not quite there yet, but certainly up-and-coming is Linda Neunzig, proprietor of 90 Farms. (Neunzig means 90 in German.) She raises amazing lamb and was a finalist in last year's Womens Chefs & Restaurateurs awards. What she needs now, seems to Cornichon, is someone to update and optimize her website.

In fact, "getting the word out" is a multi-faceted process. For generations of farmers, marketing was exactly that: fill the truck with stuff you grew and picked yourself and haul it to a local market. There's great satisfaction in actually meeting your customers, be they Ballard bohemians or Capitol Hill chefs. But there's an even better way to stay in touch, and that's using technolgy to go beyond brick-and-mortar, crate-and-awning markets: Up-to-date marketing requires a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and an email marketing program.

Fortunately, we're seeing a rise in public and private organizations helping family farmers, while Caswell and his alliance of chefs are getting together on the demand side. Local farmers markets abound in urban centers, and culinary tourism is also on the rise. One by one, farmers with superior products, a bit of vision and a dose of technology are beginning to take the next step: dressing their commodities in the shiny threads of a brand name.

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This page contains a single entry by Cornichon published on January 5, 2010 10:00 AM.

They Come, They Go was the previous entry in this blog.

Drinking Bottled Water from Hope Springs is the next entry in this blog.

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