 Hello everyone and welcome to Farming Matters. Thanks for tuning in. I am your host, Erin Schneider. I work with the North Central Region CER program and I am really excited today. I'm joined by our very special guest, Jeannie Seabrook who you'll get to hear more about. She's with Glass Mr. Canary. Yeah, Jeannie, welcome to the show and looking forward to learning, learning what you have to share with us today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Well, as has already been said, I'm Jeannie Seabrook. I'm the owner and operator of Glass Mr. Canary. We've been open since 2010. We got our canary license in 2014. So the very first thing that I started the canary for was to teach people how to do home preservation in various forms and to teach all of the things that grandma used to teach, which is our theme. In 2014, we upped it by getting our Ohio Department of Agriculture license and signing up with the FDA so that we could sell our canned goods. Shortly thereafter, a farmer came to me with a big load of hot peppers and said, can you do something with these? And I said, eh, what's the hey? We've not worked with other farmers before. We usually can what we grow. But I had time and I'm always up for something new. So we put that into jars and he very quickly sold out of it. And it got me thinking about all of the waste that goes on in our food system. And so I was presented with the opportunity to apply for a SAIR grant. And so that was our first grant we applied in 2016 to work with farmers to get their produce, their fresh but overstopped produce into jars so that they could have a fresh product to sell throughout the year. So that's where this all started. We built, my sister and I built a 900 square foot building. It has a second floor, but this is the first floor. So we have a licensed kitchen and a dining area in the first floor. And then this picture of all these jars, that's the second floor and that's where our country store is. So we sell at the Canary as well as other places. Our vision was, work with local farmers to save produce and save our ecosystem to the degree that we were able to. So these are, this is our vision right here. Keep it out of compost, get some additional income both for us and the farmers, provide fresh and local on a larger scale than we were previously doing with the shelf stable products. And that meant getting out and exploring new recipes. So we use our approved recipes, but we're also willing to work with them to get their recipes approved. In 2016 was this middle piece of equipment. And you can see it's right beside the stove. So it's a really huge pot. It's got a steam jacket kettle and it's essentially a huge double boiler. So it allows us to do 40 gallons of product at one time. Much better than our 11 jars of jam that we were previously doing. Can you explain how this kettle works? How do you get everything out of it? I have to hand scoop it out. Okay. Yeah, it's just a big pot. That little thing on the bottom is a spigot but it's too low to work with. And so it's for cleaning the pot. I didn't know any professional canners. I didn't go to any place that had these pieces of equipment. I just kind of looked around and said, I think I want that. So there are other pots, like they're called tilt kettles that are more common in restaurants and school settings that can be literally tilt supported to ours. There's also another piece of equipment that could suck it out of there. And it's called a capper. And the capper could suck it out, put it into jars, put the lids on and move on. But the difficulty with us is space in our situation. Then jump to 2021, we reapplied for a refrigerator cooler. And because we had a new fridge, a number of farmers that wanted to come at the same time because everybody's harvest is in. And I had to stagger or, and I had to do it right away. I didn't have a place to store it. So it came in, it got processed that day and went back out. So it was really difficult to manage if I had more than one farmer that wanted to come. And then at the same time, we bought this food processor that's on the right that you see the pickles coming out of. And that vastly improved our speed over a mandolin. So the next step was to develop the relationships with the farmers. And these are some pictures actually from this year. So Evans Ranch in Southern Ohio brought us tomatoes this year. And so those are on the left. And you can see they're absolutely beautiful but they are their seconds. So they were the wrong size. They were maybe a little bit blemished, you know, who knows, but they were gonna go to the compost bed. So now, so this picture up on the top right shows our previous method of doing these things. So we would use pots and pots and pots on the stove. It was a little on the miserable side and you tended to scorch things. So by getting the pot, the steam jacket kettle, it won't burn things. And it allows us to do it at a very high temperature so that product gets done faster and with a better quality. So we were really excited. You can see that the steam jacket kettle is over there in the corner. We're gonna dump everything in there and right before that picture. On the left-hand side, those are some cucumbers that are in our walk-in cooler, icing down before they're being made into pickles. And the bottom is our tomato processing machine. It's our saucer. So we can dump a lot of tomatoes in there very quickly and now do them directly into the pan or into the pot, saving another step and another and making it possible for us to work with more people. So these are my employees, which was another benefit as a SARE grant. It kick-started by helping us hire employees to work with the grant and they ended up staying on for the whole summer. These two gals are fabulous. And then on the bottom, there's just some finished pickles and some pictures of our products that have been labeled already. So on that score, we also dual-label. One of the pieces of this was to work with farmers on their marketing. So more than one did not have their own logo and so we helped them develop their logo and so they could put their own sticker on the jar as well as ours that says produce provided by and their logo and maybe some information about their farm. So that's a dual marketing tool. Every day is a learning day. You think you got something down and then you realize you really don't. The first thing was business management. Things like taking payments. What to do if somebody is once product but they don't want to pay you yet. How to manage our books and our records so that we could tell what we were doing. Employee management. Marin and Cameron would come in and I wouldn't have a plan. And so I wasn't using my employees to the best of their abilities. They were just kind of hanging around a lot of the time. So I really needed to back up and begin making a plan every day before they arrived for what they were gonna do that day. This year the supply chain and last year during COVID I had a back stock of supplies, jars, lids, et cetera that I need. But this year when I went to order them I couldn't find what I was needing to put it in the jar. And so I ordered, I ordered some lids from the recommendation of the people I work with, they came in. We did a thousand jars of pickles and none of them sealed. Big farmer, we had to send them all back, start over again. The farmer, we gave product to the farmer but it had to be refrigerated. It was not a shelf stable product. And you cannot redo pickles. So it was really a bad choice. Educating farmers. This on the left is a picture of some cucumbers that came in and I'm not sure that it's large enough for you to see it, but educating farmers on what good produce looks like when it comes to me and how to transport it correctly. This is a picture of cucumbers that drove around in somebody's truck for about eight hours in the heat of the summer before coming to me. So you can see that they're moldy. So we didn't do anything with these. We couldn't salvage by even picking through them every boxes. So that was pretty disappointing. So what we want is this thing on the right where they see it comes out from the field. They sort it for what's marketable and we'll take the seconds. Canning should be about the seconds and saving what can't be used for market or if you have a bad market day, then bring it to us. We don't want necessarily people who are growing specifically for us. We wanna save what's going to go bad. Okay, our successes. The SARA grant allowed us to definitely raise the quality of our products, both the steam jacket kettle, which allows us to do big batches so it's more consistent product and it's not burnt. I'm not losing product. Also the cooler allows us to stagger what we make while it's still keeping temperature and staying good. We were able to provide some employment that we would otherwise not be able to do with the increase in our business. And increase local food availability. This is a sustainable program where a sustainable farm and we wanna do what we can to help farmers take that small leap into sustainability for very small. So we're not gonna solve the world's problems but if we can solve a little corner of our world's problems, then we're at least making a dent and I think I feel like if everybody does what they're capable of doing, then we'll leave in place a better world for our next generation. And as a grandparent, it's something that I'm concerned about. Networking. Lots of networking has happened through this. You guys are an example. I'm so many fun, neat and interesting people. It's been incredibly fun to work with them. And of course, increased profitability both for us and the farmer who wasn't going to get anything from that product and others in feeding his hogs. So I feel like those are some pretty big markers of success. What advice would you offer to another farmer or an eco printer or someone who wants to be like, hey, you know what? I see this problem of food going to waste. I need to make beautiful products and I can do that. Okay, so somebody gave us advice when we began that whatever size or building footprint that we plan, we should double it. We didn't have the space to double it. So we just 50% of it. And I have no regrets. Spend the money out front to get what you think you need because when you, you know, there are certain things that you can piecemeal along the way, but you can't change your building. It sounds funny, but get educated. Since I didn't get, you know, go out and find, one thing we did do is go to licensed kitchens. We went and toured either formally or just kind of snuck our way around several commercial kitchens. And I think that I also don't plan on making a profit right away. So whatever you're doing, plan for the long haul and make sure that you're able to support yourselves in other ways until this really gets off the ground because it won't for at least five years. Where did the recipes come up from for all of the products that you're creating for the farmers to sell at the market and that you're selling at your shop upstairs? That's a good question. I do two kinds of recipes. I do the really old ones that, you know, the farmers around here who are 80s and 90s give me and because they don't want them to go to the wayside and I develop my own recipes. So we have some of both in the canry. What I don't do is go out on the internet and find somebody else's recipe and duplicate it. I find no joy in that. But I do want to give people something that they can't get in the grocery store. Every one of my recipes is it goes to a third party who is a food scientist, someplace like Cornell or there's one in Michigan State. My person happens to be local. And then I give him the recipe, he rewrites it with the rules that I need to follow, what the pH needs to be, et cetera, the procedures. And then I submit it to the FDA. So all of my recipes are fully circulated all the way through all of that process. You know, I was just reading that, like another success, you know, you talk about the food waste stream, like what was it, some are upwards of 30,000 pounds of produce that was transformed. I don't work with dozens of farmers. I work with four to eight farmers a season. So the amount of waste that is out there, these are small operations. And so for us to, you know, get that much and then click counting, I'm sure it hit 50,000 that year, is incredible and a little disheartening. What has your project led to? Is it sort of mentioned being at four to eight farmers a year, is it in kind of a sweet spot or do you see any other lessons learned about scalability? If I was younger, for my business model, which is really, I want to stay small. I think that this can be done on a larger scale successfully. The difficulty is in Ohio that we only have a, we have a very limited amount of months that that produce comes in. So that needs to be a situation where you can earn income the rest of the year or you can make enough income during that part of the year to sustain yourself for the rest of the year. Our canning is a piece of our puzzle, but I am not totally reliant on it for my income. You know, the truth is one of the really fun things about this is that my first priority is by far my kids and my grandkids. And this allows me to get up and leave at a moment's notice when, you know, or just close down for the weeks so I can go babysit in Illinois or North Carolina or wherever I need to be. And I, you know, it's the right, it's not necessarily the best business model, but it's the right business model for me. Do you know they say you're planting the right plant at the right place at the right time rather than try to impose your will on a space? It sounds the same kind of thing. You're like at the right, you got your works for you and the space and conditions and all of it. So that's, you know, something. Yeah.