Andrew Stout: Making a Difference in Our Food System

But like many such ven­tures, it started small. Fifteen years ago, Stout and his wife, Wendy Munroe, founded a farm and CSA on three acres of land in Washington State. Seeking to pro­vide bet­ter food to ever more cus­tomers, the farm expanded greatly and today is at 400 acres. However, Stout saw that if he were to bring in the prod­ucts of other like-minded pro­duc­ers under one com­pany umbrella, he could not only greatly broaden his ser­vice but ben­e­fit many other grow­ers as well.

“We got into farm­ing when we saw a need,” Stout told Organic Connections. “It was man­i­fested in the fact that there are a lot of poor food choices that are forced upon peo­ple, and there is a bet­ter oppor­tu­nity avail­able to them. We rec­og­nized that that oppor­tu­nity really could be brought more to the fore­front by us cre­at­ing a new mar­ket­place, which would allow us to share some of our suc­cess with our con­tem­po­rary grow­ers and arti­sans, with the com­mu­nity being the big­ger beneficiary.

“Growing in such a way, we real­ized we could actu­ally move the nee­dle and make a real impact on people’s food choices and the over­all food sys­tem on an even big­ger scale. Rather than wait for some­body else to do some­thing that is so vital and impor­tant, we kind of stepped up. ‘Easy’ was cer­tainly not part of the equation—it was tough and meant long hours and hard choices. But we were able to make a difference.”

The Personal Touch

Stout has found that it takes the per­sonal touch to main­tain the qual­ity in his busi­ness. “I’m a nosy farmer,” said Stout. “I’ve been to hun­dreds of oper­a­tions. We visit them; we talk with them; we find out what their prod­uct line is, mak­ing sure that it’s got qual­ity and integrity. But then we also take that extra step of ask­ing them about their land stew­ard­ship prac­tices, their employ­ment prac­tices, and what makes their land and prod­uct exem­plary and spe­cial. We have 100 per­cent trans­parency in our process, so we’re telling the cus­tomers, ‘This is where your food came from.’ Full Circle is a plat­form, but the prod­ucts are grown by fam­i­lies, indi­vid­u­als, and peo­ple with great sto­ries. We feel it’s impor­tant to make sure that those are the con­nec­tions that get made.”

That per­sonal touch extends to the obtain­ing of new cus­tomers as well. Through numer­ous chan­nels, Stout is con­stantly dis­cussing his pur­pose, why it’s impor­tant and why he does it. “We do a lot of blog­ging; we believe that con­tent and engage­ment of cus­tomers is the core to the expe­ri­ence,” Stout con­tin­ued. “We are embed­ded in the com­mu­nity as best we can be. In the Pacific Northwest it has been a pas­sion of mine to be on non­profit boards, get involved with advi­sory groups—get involved with the con­ver­sa­tion, if you will.

“Once peo­ple are mem­bers, we con­tin­u­ally give them con­tent that is rel­e­vant to the offer­ing of the cur­rent week—what they can enjoy that week as they cook with their fam­i­lies, and also what’s going on in the greater food world. You find that peo­ple are curi­ous and they want to have a bet­ter food tra­di­tion, and I think many in America have real­ized that our food tra­di­tion can be some­thing dif­fer­ent than McDonald’s and fast food. While Coca-Cola is a fan­tas­ti­cally diverse and large com­pany that’s every­where, it’s not for every­body and it’s not the pri­mary or prin­ci­pal way to describe our food culture.”

North to Alaska

Full Circle now ser­vices cus­tomers in California, Washington, Idaho and Alaska—and that last state in par­tic­u­lar makes for a com­pelling story. It began with a group of peo­ple in Juneau, Alaska—a port town with no arable farmland—e-mailing Full Circle and describ­ing their poor sit­u­a­tion with regard to fresh pro­duce. “They have a rich food tra­di­tion in seafood and other great pro­teins, yet have to import almost all of their other pro­duce and sta­ples,” Stout related. “The descrip­tion that they gave at the time was, ‘We have very poor food choices here. We’re not being taken care of, so could you ship up to Alaska?’ We said yes, by all means. That grew from seven peo­ple to seven hun­dred in about a year’s time, and now we are in almost every remote vil­lage in the state.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

“We’ve even changed the com­pet­i­tive land­scape up there. The other out­lets, the brick-and-mortar gro­cery stores and the co-ops, had to step up their game in order to attract cus­tomers. We made them take notice, and they have to pay bet­ter atten­tion to the qual­ity and the sources of the food that they’re bring­ing in. That is not insignif­i­cant in my book.”

Knowledge is Key

Given the growth he and his com­pany have expe­ri­enced, it is no sur­prise that Stout sees trans­for­ma­tion of our food sys­tem becom­ing a major real­ity. “I think the trans­for­ma­tion of our food sys­tem is already in motion,” Stout opined. “To start with, we can now iden­tify what type of food is indus­trial and what type is not. The ‘organic’ des­ig­na­tion is the begin­ning of a broad look at what is fresh, pure or nat­ural. That gives us the abil­ity to mea­sure it, because we’ve got now a des­ig­na­tion that is rec­og­nized and an accred­i­ta­tion pro­gram that you can believe in.

“Then, you just watch that trend grow from 0.2 per­cent, years back, to 4 per­cent, to the present 5 or 6 per­cent of food con­sump­tion that is organic, and is grow­ing at about 9 to 10 per­cent a year. It is now not a $1 mil­lion indus­try; it’s a $25 bil­lion indus­try, grow­ing to a $100 bil­lion indus­try over the next decade. That’s sig­nif­i­cant. And within that, you’ve got the sup­port groups such as the farm­ers’ mar­kets and CSAs grow­ing at fan­tas­tic rates. As part of the Farmers Market Coalition advo­cacy group, we’re now see­ing over 8,000 farm­ers’ mar­kets in the United States; that’s up nearly 60 per­cent from the begin­ning of the last decade in 2000.

“So you see all of these big trends well under­way, and it’s the aware­ness and the edu­ca­tion value that is allow­ing it to grow. Up here in Washington and in California we see the GMO label­ing ini­tia­tives that are embark­ing, because knowl­edge is key.”

It’s a fab­u­lous amount of growth—which is all part and par­cel of Stout’s per­sonal involve­ment. “My per­sonal mis­sion is summed up in the ‘full circle’—starting with us putting seeds to soil,” he explained. “You can’t cre­ate a good local food sys­tem with­out hav­ing good food grow­ers, so that was the first foray into that. Then it became work­ing through the net­works of other good grow­ers out there. It has cer­tainly become a life­long pas­sion of mine. I enjoy good food, I enjoy the peo­ple that make it, and I just want to make sure this is going to be a long-term and endur­ing opportunity—because the alter­na­tives, the non­food alter­na­tives, are frankly scary.

“We can eas­ily point to what we’re try­ing to do, but it’s even eas­ier to say what we’re not: we’re not mass-produced; we’re not indus­trial food; we’re not non­food. Unfortunately those are com­mon choices, and we’ve cre­ated a soci­ety that has been quite good at mak­ing non­food choices a neces­sity in people’s lives.

“I think we’re really start­ing to wake up to a change,” Stout con­cluded. “It’s still going to take some broader approaches. I hope Full Circle is going to be one of those—an endur­ing change ele­ment to cre­ate a bet­ter, health­ier and more nat­ural way of eating.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.fullcircle.com.