Savoring the Season

This past Saturday, plums made their maiden appearance at the Burlington Farmers’ Market – a vivid reminder to enjoy each precious moment knowing that Vermont's growing season is brilliant but short. Here at the Co-op, our produce department is bursting at the seams with local fruits and veggies right now, but becomes a very different landscape by January with the majority of our fruits and veggies from afar. What if the Co-op could preserve some of this bounty and make it available far into the darker months?

Frozen fruits and vegetables seem like the most logical place to start – Vermont farmers are already growing the crops we’d love to see in our freezer aisles and, as any home-scale preserver knows, the freezing process is relatively straightforward. 

Last winter Vermont Mystic Pie Company generously offered us some of their surplus local frozen blueberries. Adam’s Berry Farm has always done a small amount of frozen organic blueberries and occasional raspberries. But what would it take to really expand the supply?

This year we set ourselves a goal – develop a pilot to see what it would take to develop frozen fruits and vegetables and trial one or two products to get a sense for demand.

Freezing in my kitchen is straightforward. When the sour cherry tree in my front yard ripens in early July, we pit the berries and freeze them on a sheet tray and pack in Ziplocs. Veggies require an additional step – blanching briefly in boiling water before freezing. The most complicated part is fitting just a few more bags into the freezer come the end of August. Freezing on a commercial scale happens to be a lot more complicated. You need a blanching machine big enough to hold the large volume of produce through the blanching process. Unlike at home, placing product directly into a commercial storage freezer is a recipe for disaster. A large quantity of room-temperature product congeals and freezes in a mushy block. The produce must first be individually quick frozen in a blast freezer, essentially a freezer on steroids with turbo fans, before it’s tucked into a large storage freezer. Additional details to work out are packaging decisions (10 ounce bags? 1 pound bags?), labeling decisions, and where to store multiple pallets of frozen stuff.

Fortunately our timing is perfect. The Vermont Food Venture Center, a shared commercial kitchen that helps new businesses develop products, has just relocated to a new facility in Hardwick and is excited to work with us to develop frozen produce. They’ve got all the freezers, blanchers, and know-how to get these veggies in the door fresh and out the door frozen.

As I write, Pete’s Greens in Craftsbury is growing 2,500 pounds of spinach at their farm. If all goes well, we will have local frozen spinach on our shelves this fall. If we’re really lucky, it may be joined by frozen corn and blueberries!

Just make sure to get the plums while they’re fresh at the Farmers’ Market; they’re one that we’ll just have to savor with the season.