SIJ Q&A JU LY 2 0 0 5

Name change a ‘natural’move for Pacific Foods

BY C ELESTE LE C OMPTE

All the doors are propped open and the sharp

smell of roasted red peppers lingers in the air at
the Pacific Foods process development building
where CEO Chuck Eggert keeps his office.
A food scientist and horticulturalist by
training, Eggert says he prefers to work on
product development and at the company’s
195-acre organic and transitional farms in
Oregon. Pacific Foods began acquiring farmland
five years ago and turning it over to what Eggert
describes as “1900s style farming,” with a
combination of cattle and crops, and an emphasis
on cover crops and healthy soil.
Going back to the roots of food and farm is at
the core of Eggert’s vision for Pacific Foods. As
the company unveils its new corporate identity,
“Pacific Natural Foods,” and introduces a new line
of chilies, stews and rice dishes, Eggert says he’s
focused on retaining the company’s commitment
to the earliest wave of natural food consumers.

The name shift will make the company’s
values and practices visible to all consumers,
explains Kevin Tisdale, director of marketing.
From expanding its farming operations to its
in-house efforts to reduce landfill-bound waste,
the company exudes pride about its evolving
practices.
While a technician experimented nearby with
extracting the distinct flavor of roasted peppers,
Eggert sat down to talk with SIJ about the
company’s metamorphosis from Pacific Foods to
Pacific Natural Foods.
SIJ: Why have you decided to become Pacific
Natural Foods? How have you changed what
you’re doing as a company?
Eggert: I don’t think we’ve changed anything
we’ve been doing. At this point we’re probably 40
percent organic and 60 percent natural, and we
felt this was a better representation. Our concern
was that we started out as a natural food company
and our core consumers have always been natural
and organic.
I don’t think we felt we were at the point we
could take ‘Pacific Organic Foods.’
We’re not an organic food company. Not
because we don’t want to be, but because it’s very
difficult in a lot of the product categories we deal
with to make everything 100 percent organic.
Many times you can’t source enough ingredients.
As we went along, we wanted to make a clear
definition of who we were versus a lot of the more
mainstream food processors talking about natural
Chuck Eggert said he finds new product inspiration by simply wandering around the greenhouse.
and organic foods. I think they’re adopting a lot
more of the nomenclature. It’s unclear whether
they’re adopting more of those practices or not.
SIJ: So, how do you define natural?
Eggert: When we first started doing our
‘Certified to the Source,’ we found a lot of
ingredients where we were buying, were… Well,
take natural honey. The natural supplier said,
‘Well yeah, it’s natural honey because it’s got
honey in it.’ What they forgot to tell us is it’s got
90 percent high fructose corn syrup, and it’s
because you couldn’t dry natural honey. So I think
a lot of it is going back and asking the questions.
When we look at our Certified to the Source,
we’re up to about a five- to seven-page question-
naire. Before a supplier can sell to us they have to
go through and answer all these questions. And
then we put in all the little subtle questions like,
What are your processing aids? What ingredients
are you using to make particular flavors with?
Someone could say it has soy sauce in it. Well,
there’s all kinds of different soy sauce. We don’t
just want to know it has soy sauce in it, we want
to know what kind of soy sauce you used, because
many times there’ll be what we consider non-
natural ingredients in the soy sauce.
Celeste LeCompte
We found that by asking the questions we can
verify what we’re getting. Then, when we sell a
product, we can tell people, when they ask us the
questions, that we know the answers. A lot of it is
it’s important to our customers, but it’s important
to us because we use the products too. We want to
know what’s in there.
SIJ: Why is communicating your definition of
natural to your customer base more important
now?
Eggert: I think when we started in natural
foods everybody knew everybody. We were selling
to the core natural foods consumer that shopped
at a Nature’s, shopped at a Whole Foods. And
people understood and asked questions. People
knew who you were. And as our company has
grown and our consumer base has changed, we
felt it was more important to educate people
about what some of these differences are.
Also, there’s been a huge change in how
people look at natural and how they look at
sustainability and organic from when we started
the company in 1988 to now. The more we can do
to help explain that and help educate people helps
us broaden our customer base.
We’ve found that once people try an organic

12 Sustainable Industries Journal

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food or try a natural food or understand the sus-
tainable aspect of local farming versus importing
products from around the world, there seems to
be an awareness that continues to grow. That’s
becoming a very important thing in people’s lives.
SIJ: You have an emphasis on local farming
and production right now. How is that changing
as you become a national brand?
Eggert: It’s kind of a conundrum that we face.
We probably sell 60 percent of our products on
the West Coast and 40 percent on the East Coast.
And a lot of the projects we’re working on, with
our flavors and with how we’re raising the
products, are things that we think can be
transferred to other regions of the country. So we
try and design our formulas and flavors so they
can be done in other regions. That’s something
that’s going to be more and more important as
time goes on.
We’re working with packaging that is fairly
minimal in the cradle-to-grave aspect. In a lot of
our flavor development we’re doing the same
thing — trying to minimize the steps it takes to
make a product. Typically ... peppers would go
from California to New Jersey, be made into a
flavor that’s shipped back here to be put in a soup
product that goes back there. Logic just tells you
that these things need to be simplified.
It’s easier if you’re just dealing with a local
market, and it becomes more difficult as you ...
get a broader base. So it’s a little bit of a
conundrum.
SIJ: As you expand your operations, do you
think that you’ll have farms in other parts of the
country as well?
Eggert: We’ve gotten into farming as a way to
understand the supply chain. What we’d like to do
with our farms is start raising a crop, understand
what we’re doing with the crop, and then create
an open forum so that anyone else that we deal
with can come and look at what we’re doing. We
can say, ‘Look, you can farm this way ... You need
to approach it with a different set of viewpoints.
But you can actually make money doing it.’ So
our goal isn’t to constantly expand our farms and
farm everything ourselves. I think it’s really to be
used as a model for other people.
You have to take away the ‘This is how it’s
always been done’ and look at it from the stand-
point of what’s the most responsible way to do it,
and what’s the most technically advanced way to
do these things? And once you do them it’s
amazing. They do work. But you do have to work
at it. It doesn’t just happen.
I think in agriculture in particular — and the
same with food processing — it’s turned into ‘It’s
just easier to put additives in,’ and ‘It’s just easier
to put preservatives in and artificial colors.’ And
the irony is that simplicity is still the best way to
do it. And it actually in many respects is the
easiest way to do it.
On almost any product development you can
tell the age of the person doing the product
development by how many ingredients they use.
Someone that’s a food scientist that’s just out of
school will come up with something with 30
different things in it. The person that’s been
doing it here for a while will have five. So, a lot of
our ... development is based on going back to
classic techniques to make ... simple flavors.
I think that’s our natural inclination, to
simplify the number of steps to make a product.
How can we make the flavor or minimize the
number of components we have in our things?
And I think that what we’re doing can make a
difference. We can enjoy what we’re doing, and we
can provide opportunities for people with what
we’re doing. We can model to the community and
other people that these things are doable and you
don’t have to pay a premium to have local products.
“Once people try an
organic food or understand
the sustainable aspect of
local farming, there seems
to be an awareness that
continues to grow.”
SIJ: How do you feel like you’ve been able to
do that?
Eggert: I should clarify that. I’m not saying
that you’re not going to pay a premium compared
to an existing product. But ... I think that as scale
goes up and as the awareness goes up and people
actually delve into the labels and the sourcing and
what they’re buying, then it is a comparable
shopping experience.
Can you always find something cheaper? Yes.
But that’s where you have to look back at the
quality of the source and quality of the finished
product. We always like to look at it from a label
and ingredients standpoint. What are you actually
buying?
SIJ: You’ve talked about the importance of
reading labels and knowing about the products
you’re buying as a consumer. There are a lot of
people who aren’t used to reading labels the way
you’re talking about. How do you get past that,
and do you think that’s going to change?
Eggert: I think it will change. I think there’s a
SIJ Q&A
need to do more education. We need to explain to
people that on our ingredients statement there
might be 10 to 12 ingredients, which is different
than having to devote the whole back panel to the
ingredients statement. We, for a number of years,
were in the unique position that our consumers
knew.
I think the national statistic is 8 percent of the
population has been in ... a natural foods store —
a Whole Foods, a Wild Oats. So our consumer is
8 percent of the population currently, and we’re
trying to reach out to the next 8 percent. We’re
not trying to reach out to 100 percent of the
population. It is a baby step; we’re not trying to do
a Goliath leap.
I think that we can accomplish two things. I
think we can help expand our product line. But
we can also help educate people, which helps our
industry in total and develops a lot of the
sustainability-type things.
SIJ: Natural foods consumers are your base,
but a lot of your efforts seem to be attempts to
reach out further into the mainstream market.
What does this mean for your future?
Eggert: I think philosophically our No. 1 goal
is to take care of the natural food consumer. Over
the years we’ve seen a number of people that see
the allure of mainstream, because it’s a much
bigger market, and they forget who their core
consumer is.
We believe that if we meet the needs of our
core consumers, it will just expand out as people
become more and more aware of what we’re
doing. Consequently, we’re not changing to meet
the mass market; we’re letting the mass market
change to meet us. We’re very careful when we
expand our product lines and do other things that
we’re not compromising our core values to get
more business.
But partially, the rest of the world seems to be
changing and embracing a lot of these concepts
that we’ve been working on for years.
SIJ: Why?
Eggert: I think there’s a realization that eating
habits need to change, that people need to be
more aware of what they’re eating, where it’s
coming from. Obviously, local is better. But
knowing, having a sense of confidence where
your food is coming from, is really critical.
I’ve always used the example that eating
grapes in January isn’t particularly normal.
There’s certain things you need to look forward
to — grapes in August from California and
Washington. It gives you a reason to be excited
about something ...
But it hasn’t hurt that people have learned how
to grow organic food that doesn’t look strange
anymore. G
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