Meet Minnesota’s Cottage Food Community: Breaking Down Barriers to Building a Registered Food Business
Playing in the Mud: Functional Heirlooms’ Norwegian-Mexican-American Pottery
Feeding the Grass for the Best Grass Fed Beef: Blackberry Ridge Farms
The Black Radish: Reinventing the Urban CSA, One Yard at a Time
Behind the Scenes: How Shared-Use Kitchens Shape Our Local Foodscape
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Simple Cider Co: Pressing Apples to Build Community
“Half of our company is about the apples. The other half is about the space,” explains Nick Revoir of Simple Cider Co. “The space will be designed for all generations of a family. It will be a place of wonder, like walking into a children’s museum, where the ceiling and the floors aren’t just a normal design. It will be built as a safe place for the kids to be themselves while adult friends connect, commiserate and support each other.”
Fiber Arts: Raising Sheep, Producing Wool, and Finding Community at Get Bentz Farm
As the baroness of Get Bentz Farm, Theresa uses both wool from her flock and fleece purchased from shepherds throughout the region to create her signature products. “I love that I’ve become a producer of yarn in our industry,” smiles Theresa. “I enjoy having control over the end product. I get to collaborate with others to create something that people use.”
A Little Boost: Ty’s Ginseng Brings MN Grown Roots to Market
With over 70 years of combined experience, Tyler Saemrow of Morristown’s Ty’s Ginseng learned to grow ginseng under his grandfather’s tutelage starting when he was 10 years old. “I love being out in the woods and simply watching our plants grow. It takes time, lots of it, but it’s so worth it.”
Best in Show: First-Generation Family Farm Rustic Roots is MN Garlic Festival Winner
The Olberdings bought a neglected piece of farmland in Alexandria. Removing the decaying farm equipment and taking care of the land itself allowed them to establish their award-winning garlic crop.
Mushrooms Powered by the Sun: Fiddlehead Knob Farm’s Sustainable Path Forward
Fiddlehead Knob continues to increase their annual production to better meet demand in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa. To continue their quest to do this sustainably, geothermal heating and cooling is part of the farm vision board.
From Waste to Wonder Wool: Woollets Garden Goodness
Meet Elaine Becker and Karen Mayhew, the co-founders of Woollets (wool + pellets), two creative problem solvers who converted a waste product into a valued commodity that is a more efficient soil supplement than peat.
![Coffeewomple: derived from Coddiwomple [verb] to travel purposefully to an unknown destination.
Based in NE Minneapolis, Nicole Bolea and Zach Whitney are the cofounders of Coffeewomple Roastery, the United State’s first electric roaster of directly-sourced coffee beans. Their roastery commits every day to making the more sustainable choice regardless of cost. These choices include their personal connection with their farmers around the world, their roasting process itself and their compostable packaging and shipping materials.
Nicole shares that, “We love coffee and wanted to do it with purpose. We wanted to leverage our backgrounds to roast and package more sustainably.”
Every time I talk with Nicole and Zach I learn something new about the science of roasting, the nuance of coffee’s flavor profiles or what they, as roasters and coffee aficionados, look for to create the desired flavor profile from each batch of beans.
Coffeewomple fans notice how Nicole and Zach’s process highlights the natural flavors of the beans in nuanced ways. “You can make good coffee just by starting out with a good bean. That will get you 90% of the way there,” explains Zach. “That final 10% requires a lot of testing. The palette is huge. One thing you learn early on is that you can’t add a flavor that’s not there. If it’s not in that green bean to start, you’re not going to find it.”
The search for a high quality, durable and yet compostable coffee bag was an intentional choice, even though it increases their supply costs. “Living in Minnesota where we have access to really good commercial composting, we choose to support that infrastructure. We want to show that reducing the negative environmental impact of coffee can be done. It has to be done if we’re going to still have a viable coffee crop for the next generation of farmers.”
Nicole and Zach love to invite people into their space. It’s an opportunity to share what they’ve learned about the process and product of coffee. Nicole laughs, “We relish any chance to nerd out about coffee. It is truly our favorite.”
Find Coffeewomple at the @ne_fm this winter.
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