Natural/organic-foods industry sees healthy future

In the early 1970s, a small group of idealists purchased a five-acre plot of land south of Longmont and started a commune with an alfalfa field, a handful of goats and two beehives, selling honey out of the back of a van in Boulder Canyon to make money.

The venture planted a seed that grew into Madhava Honey Ltd., doing business as Madhava Natural Sweeteners, one of the oldest natural-food companies in Colorado. Madhava still creates a buzz today, 37 year later, in the natural and organic products industry that’s blossomed along the Front Range and draws attention from across the world.

“In its infancy I was interested in offering pure, local food … working with local honey producers with a minimal amount of handling, and that was basically it,” said Craig Gerbore, founder and retired president of Madhava Natural Sweeteners. In 1976, Gerbore, a recent University of Colorado graduate, started Madhava after his friend and original commune member Bart Utley handed the business to Gerbore.

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“The honey business was a good business with growing demand as more awareness about food started to grow,” Gerbore said. He then began slowly cultivating sales in the area. Gerbore still serves on Madhava’s board.

The company expanded its product offerings and now places alternatives to highly processed cane sugar in nearly 20,000 retail locations across the United States. It employs more than 50 people, said Victoria Hartman, executive vice president for Madhava. The company pioneered the agave nectar industry in 2002.

“We were the first to bring it to the retail market in the United States, and even though the honey has pretty much stayed local … the agave nectar kind of took off,” Hartman said. They still believe in providing quality, environmentally sustainable products that are fairly priced for producers, she said, including coconut sugar, which Madhava launched in November 2011.

Coconut sugar, harvested from coconut palm trees, is less processed than cane sugar and more sustainable, with up to 75 percent more sugar produced per acre than with traditional table sugar, she said. It compares with light brown sugar in taste and consistency and can be used as a one-to-one substitute for cane sugar, Hartman said.

Madhava is one of the long-time natural-product companies that sweetened the pot for the industry’s growth along the Front Range.

“I think we have a community of legacy entrepreneurs, and what’s incredibly unique about Boulder is these legacy entrepreneurs will find time for anybody with an idea,” Hartman said. Mentoring phone calls, meetings and industry know-how help build new natural and organic businesses, she said, and make Boulder a hub of the industry.

Bill Capsalis, a natural and organic industry consultant, agrees and points to nationally known players in the industry such as Celestial Seasonings, Horizon and Silk as a few examples. He’s executive director of OpenArts Boulder and a board member of Naturally Boulder, a nonprofit trade association with close to 400 members that promotes the industry. Despite the recent economic upheaval, he sees a healthy future for the industry.

“It’s really alive with innovation and alive with opportunity,” Capsalis said, “and those two things combined really give people a lot of hope.”

The Front Range houses more than 2,000 natural and organic product companies, he said, with new ones cropping up all the time. One of those companies, Boulder Soup Works, just received the Best Young Business Award from Naturally Boulder.

Boulder Soup Works started in 2009 and produces fresh, organic, gluten-free soup as a healthy alternative to canned soups, which are often high in fat, sodium and use wheat products as thickeners, said Kate Brown, Boulder Soup Works’ chief executive.

“We’ve had to reeducate our customers on what fresh soup looks like and that it doesn’t keep forever, and it’s been kind of a rocket-ship launch since then,” Brown said.

Boulder Soup Works offers seven soup flavors and distributes in seven of Whole Foods’ 11 regions as well as in conventional grocers, dishing out 150,000 servings of soup per month.

“The growing reputation of Boulder as the epicenter of the natural-products industry, that’s been very beneficial to us,” Brown said. Boulder’s health-conscious, trend-setting consumers help educate people in other markets, Brown said, which makes retailers more willing to stock healthy foods.

Madhava continues to grow and in 2010 partnered with Greenmont Capital Partners. It plans to launch an organic honey line in the near future. Ten cents of each organic honey-line purchase will go to Madhava’s Sweet Earth Project, a foundation committed to saving bees from the devastating colony collapse of recent years.

Boulder’s healthy, environmentally conscious attitude and entrepreneurial spirit are a key ingredients to growth, Gerbore said.

“That’s pretty cool because the people who populate this area are really interested in quality food,” he said, “and that’s part of Madhava’s success: being at the right place in the right time.”