Van Buren processor eyes all of New England
It’s that time of year again, when foragers take to the Maine woods in search of one of the season’s first wild edibles.
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Contributed photo/Marada Cook Fiddleheads fresh from Aroostook County are becoming more widely available thanks to northern Maine pickers, suppliers and distributors like Van Buren-based Northern Girl. |
Few things say or taste like spring more than a freshly picked Maine fiddlehead, and thanks to two northern Maine entrepreneurs, the edible young coiled frond of the ostrich fern and the people who pick them are about to get a big marketing boost.
“We want to create a stable and food-safe system around this forage crop that no one has done before,” Troy Haines, Mapleton farmer and fiddlehead seller, said.
Every year Haines buys thousands of pounds of fresh-picked fiddleheads from local foragers and then sells them to Van Buren-based food processer Northern Girl, where they are packaged and then distributed by Crown O’Maine Organic Cooperative to restaurants and retail stores, including Hannaford supermarkets and Whole Foods, throughout New England.
This season, Haines is working with Marada Cook of Northern Girl and Crown O’Maine to revolutionize their entire fiddlehead gathering process from the forest to the consumer.
“We are trying to elevate our market presence,” Cook said. “We are looking to really ‘brand’ the Aroostook County fiddlehead.”
A big part of that branding, according to Cook and Haines, is making sure the consumer knows not only where their fiddleheads came from but that they have been gathered in a sustainable manner.
A University of Maine Cooperative Extension study has shown harvesting no more than half of the available fiddleheads allows the plant to maintain a sustainable and healthy population.
“From our perspective, everything about fiddlehead picking should fit with the practices of sustainability and fair trade,” Cook said. “We want to elevate our brand with a cleaner, safer product that can be directly connected to Aroostook County. We all love the country and [are] proud to have food coming from here.”
Before any of Haines’ pickers take to the woods this year, they must participate in a daylong workshop and training session covering sustainable harvesting, handling the fiddleheads in the field and basic food safety practices.
“A lot of the folks who pick fiddleheads do it for some extra money and are not experts in the food trade,” Cook said. “We are talking to them about keeping their buckets clean, not smoking while gathering fiddleheads, making sure no debris gets into the bags with the fiddleheads, how to keep them cool and the importance of them being brought in the same day as they are picked.”
Haines and Cook held their first training session last week for about 20 prospective pickers, and a second training session will be held later this month. Haines plans to hire 45 pickers this year to supply Cook with about 30,000 pounds of northern Maine fiddleheads she needs for wholesale and retail sales in 10-pound bulk packages and single-serving 5-ounce containers.
And while 30,000 pounds won’t put much of a dent in the millions of pounds of fiddleheads Haines said are in Aroostook County, he and Cook don’t want to see any areas over-harvested or permanently damaged.
“We are really going over the basics of sustainable harvesting with the pickers,” Cook said. “We really want our pickers to look at the process from a stewardship point of view.”
That’s good news to Dave Fuller, agriculture and non-timber forest products professional with University of Maine Cooperative Extension, who has spent years studying fiddleheads.
“Sustainability is really No. 1 with any wild harvested plant,” Fuller said. “In some areas, I’ve seen up to 30 people at a time picking.”
Savvy pickers know where the best spots are, he said, and return year after year, which can be a problem. Between 2005 and 2008, Fuller compared harvesting methods among three fiddlehead plots.
“One plot was the control area, and I took nothing out,” he said. “In the second plot I harvested half of what came up that season with no subsequent harvest, and in the third plot I took every marketable fiddlehead that came up, which simulates what most people picking fiddleheads for cash do.”
In the plots where no or half the fiddleheads were harvested, Fuller said the same number of plants came up the following season.
“But where I picked everything, after three years, 90 percent of those plants were dead,” he said. “If we have people going back to the same spots every year and taking everything, over time there will be less and less fiddleheads.”
Haines does not want to see that happen.
“One of the best management practices we are talking to our pickers about is the maximum they can pick in an area so the fiddleheads can also regrow,” he said. “Frankly, we know there are millions and millions of pounds of fiddleheads in the woods in Aroostook County, and we want to keep it that way.”
According to Cook, there is a growing market for all those northern Maine fiddleheads.
“Last year we shipped 10,000-pounds of fiddleheads,” she said. “We are looking to triple that this year.”
To people “from away,” there is a certain woodsy mystique to a Maine fiddlehead, Cook said, and she’s ready to capitalize on that.
“Here in Maine the fiddlehead is such a traditional food, we just assume people know about them,” she said. “But in other places it’s such a sexy vegetable and really seen as a specialty seasonal forage gourmet food from Maine.”
At the start of the fiddlehead season, for example, Cook said it is not at all unusual to see people pay $19 per pound for the greens at a New York City farmers market.
“That price drops quickly as the season moves on,” she said. “That can put northern Maine at a disadvantage because we start picking so late in that season.”
That’s where branding the Aroostook County fiddlehead and making it the must-have green comes in, she said.
Cook also stressed that, just because fiddleheads may sell for close to $20 per pound in the big city, it does not mean anyone can fill a car with fiddleheads, drive south and make a killing.
“There are a lot of steps that go into pricing between picking and the final market that people don’t see,” she said. “From washing, food safety, packaging and delivery there is a lot of ‘value added’ going on [and] over time as part of our commitment to fair trade I’d like to see transparency in those steps so people understand what it takes to get this product to market.”
A big part of that, she said, is shining the spotlight on the people at the start of the process.
“Right now the identity of the person at the headwaters of the supply chain is anonymous and they are not engaged in the marketing of fiddleheads,” Cook said. “We want to change that and give them a voice so they are no longer invisible to the consumer.”
According to Haines, Northern Girl and Crown O’Maine Cooperative are quickly becoming the the largest distributors of Fiddleheads in New England and are continuing to grow.
“We are essentially trying to corner the market for supplying this forage food,” Haines said. “It’s really pretty exciting.”
Staff Writer Anthony Brino contributed to this report.
