[Music]
I'm a seventh generation farmer. We have 2,200 acre farm. We grow beans, spelt,
which is a low gluten similar to wheat, and corn. We got into the organic business in the late 90's.
We put in a processing facility about five years ago.
Value-added means to me the ability to take something that we grow here in Michigan, add value to it,
in this case cleaning it, putting it in a package, and then selling it to consumers, both in this state and out of this state.
Shortly after we got into the processing and cleaning our own product, I began to look at different avenues to
take our product more to the consumer, obviously to add value to it, but also to bring buisness to MI
in an attempt to take our product form the farm directly to a grocery store or to a consumers table
I would say I'm very proud. It has been- there has been a lot of work go into it with various people.
It's really cool and interesting to see my name on a product, which I feel there's a little more stress to make
sure that I put the best product in that box now because that is my name on it.
The MSU Product Center really helped us take an idea and a concept from its infancy to on a store shelf.
There were a lot of things that we didn't know how to do. We understand farming. We understand row crop
production. We even understand the processing but we didn't know what grocery stores wanted.
We didn't know how to deal with brokers. We didn't even know what the bar code on the back- where that
came from or what it really meant. They helped us along the way answer all of those questions and
put us in contact with people and companies that would help us solve, or give us the solution
for the problem that we had.
In the future, we would like to see Beans in a Box in a majority of the grocery stores across the country.
I think the thing that puts a smile on my face is when I see everybody work together very hard on a project
and then you see it come together.
We are Findlay's Organics and we're proud to receive the Value-Added Agriculture Award for MSU Product Center.
