Local Loan Recipients: Rocky Mountain

Whole Foods Market's Rocky Mountain Region includes Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.

Boulder Ice Cream

Boulder, Colorado

Beginning as a small retail ice cream shop on the famous Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado, Boulder Ice Cream has evolved into a manufacturer of compelling, all-natural gourmet flavors. Their non-homogenized, slow churn process, combined with a unique blend of all-natural ingredients, creates an extra rich and smooth, homemade-style ice cream. Boulder Ice Cream has been selling to Whole Foods Market for about ten years.

They used their loan to finance business expansion, including the launch of an organic ice cream line.

Check out Boulder Ice Cream in the Whole Story blog!

Caleb & Milo

Arroyo Seco, New Mexico

Christopher Maher has been a chef for over two decades, having run catering businesses and two restaurants. He and his wife Valerie started Caleb & Milo in 2007 through their cooking school Cooking Studio Taos. Named after their sons, Caleb & Milo produces salsa (tomatillo and tomato) and an eggplant spread. They plan to expand with a lentil soup, a pesto, and a fresh marinara sauce.

The Mahers will be using their loan to pay off and add refrigeration to their delivery van, purchase a heat sealer and dicer machine, and purchase labels and packaging.

Desert Blends of Taos

Taos, New Mexico

Desert Blends of Taos provides bath and body products infused with native plants, formulated for the desert climate with all natural plant derived ingredients. Desert Blends is a five-person company that currently sources out its production of body care items to an outside company. These blends, made from indigenous and organic ingredients around the Taos area of New Mexico, are shipped from Taos, New Mexico to Fort Collins, Colorado where they are sent through filling machines for packaging purposes. The packaged goods are then shipped back to Taos where the finished products are distributed to local hotels and retailers in New Mexico.

Toni Spies, founder and creator of Desert Blends, is a registered herbalist, who carefully chooses the ingredients for her products, and is ecstatic to find out about our loan program. Toni would like to use the loan to purchase her own filling machines. She has visions of packing her own products in Taos.

In her own facility, production will be much faster, more cost-efficient, and more controllable for quality. The end product will not have traveled hundreds of miles just to be packed into bottles, and hundreds of miles back to be distributed from the warehouse in Taos. This will enable even more mindful awareness of our environment, as is part of her mission statement. The loan will enable her to maintain the value and integrity of her plant botanicals, while sustaining and supporting the company's growth.

Evol Burritos

Boulder, Colorado

Philip Anson founded Phil's Fresh Foods (now Evol Burritos) in January 2002. Since then, the burrito company has gone from being a small one-man show to a nationally-distributed company. Over the past two years, the company has become automated, allowing them to increase production and to enter into co-packing and private label manufacturing. Evol Burritos are available in all of our U.S. and Canada stores.

Phil used the Local Producer Loan funds to expand into a neighboring space, install in-line freezing equipment, and increase in-line quality control with the purchase and installation of a metal detector and check weigher combo machine.

Full Circle Farm

Boulder, Colorado

Full Circle Farm (aka Rocky Mountain Pumpkin Ranch) is a certified organic vegetable grower and has grown vegetables for Whole Foods Market for seven years. Dave Asbury of Full Circle Farm has worked to revive area crops that have been lost to residential and commercial development. Full Circle will now provide our organic asparagus since we lost our resource when our former supplier retired and his farm closed. In addition, Dave is developing heirloom melons for production and is planting heirloom and antique varieties of "adolescent" lettuces.

Full Circle Farm has partnered with Boulder County Open Space to keep greenbelt from development. Boulder County is losing growers at an alarming rate due to the cost of land and the economic pressures associated with growing in a volatile weather climate.

The loan will be used to build a produce-packing shed to better serve Whole Foods Market, the Full Circle Farm stand, area farmers markets, and Dave's other accounts.

Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy

Boulder, Colorado

Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy produces award-winning farmstead goat cheese. The company currently has 22 employees and produces both milk and artisanal cheese on the premises. Haystack also produces a variety of fresh goat cheeses in Longmont, Colorado. Owner Jim Schott has been in the goat dairy business over 15 years after leaving a position in education.

The dairy currently has herd of 120 goats which Jim hopes to expand to 800, in part through our loan program. The first step in the expansion will come with our loan which will go toward building a nursery for the kids housing up to 140 at a time. This will allow for a controlled, closed herd as new animals will not be purchased but rather bred from the current herd, keeping disease and genetic abnormality at a low.

The dairy is currently under an expansion having just recently purchased 80 acres to expand on the previous seven-acre dairy. This expansion allows Jim to grow the herd as the acreage is currently the only factor limiting production in Colorado. The dairy is also in the process of starting production on a new line of hard cheeses in Oklahoma in a new facility sponsored by the USDA.

The dairy is also in the process of applying for certification with Humane Farm Animal Care "certified humane raised and handled" as well as getting organic certification within the next three years (depending on grazing techniques from 1-3 years). At Haystack, community education is an important component of the farm. The dairy will be able to offer farm visits, farm tours, cheese-making internships and more community outreach programs. Haystack also supports a prison work program at the Canon City federal prison. The inmates raise and tend the herds selling off the milk which Haystack purchases to produce product which they currently are not capable of producing due to milk-production restraints.

Several techniques will be utilized to preserve the surrounding ecosystem that includes upgrading the water recycling system. Whey will be reused as fertilizer, compost enhancer, and animal feed for several hogs (another employee benefit). Other uses of whey include — ricotta cheese production, dried whey, etc. Animal waste and bedding from pens will be collected and composted in silage pits to produce methane (which will be used to fuel the boiler in the creamery) and finished organic compost that can be sold to gardeners and landscapers. The expanded dairy will utilize ducks for fly and pest control in the pens. Goats and ducks get along very well and ducks provide an excellent natural method for fly control since they eat the larvae.

ImagiPLAY

Boulder, Colorado

Barbera Aimes founded ImagiPLAY in 1998 with the purchase of a small cardboard building block business. In the years since then, they have transitioned to becoming a leading distributor of earth-friendly wooden toys. Barbera is using the loan funds to purchase additional inventory, which will help them meet the increased demand for their product that their relationship with WFM has created.

Check out ImagiPLAY on the Whole Story blog!

Justin's Nut Butter

Boulder, Colorado

Justin's Nut Butter is a rapidly growing company started from scratch by Justin Gold, a young entrepreneur in Boulder. Justin makes a variety of flavored nut butters, differentiated not only by yummy flavors such as organic cinnamon peanut, honey almond, and maple almond, but also by their availability in single serving squeeze packs for school lunches, hiking, biking, etc.

Whole Foods Market in Boulder was Justin's first retail outlet for his nut butters, and our Team Members have worked with him to grow his business. Justin's Nut Butter can now be found in every one of our eleven regions! He used his loan to expand his production of the single serving packs.

MouCo Cheese Company

Fort Collins, Colorado

MouCo Cheese Company produces artisan cheeses and is a small family-owned and family-operated cheese production facility in Fort Collins, Colorado. The company began producing fine artisan cheeses seven years ago. Birgit Halbreiter, president of the company, grew up in Bavaria, Germany where cheese making was a family tradition. Her father Franz is a master cheese maker in Germany and serves as a consultant to the company. Her husband, Robert Poland, makes and oversees cheese production.

MouCo currently produces four cheeses including ColoRouge, Camembert, Blu (newest variety), and Affinity, a Whole Foods Market exclusive and made with antibiotic-free milk from La Luna Dairy in Windsor, Colorado.

The loan will be used to purchase new cheese-making equipment so MouCo can expand its selection and increase production volume. By purchasing new forms, the company can accommodate a mix of wheel sizes in the same production batch and eventually, new wheel sizes leading to new types of cheeses as they allow for variable sizing. The new molds and the funding will allow decreased labor costs as they are currently producing 1000 wheels on make days which will go to 2000 without an increase in labor due to the efficiency of the new system. The long term goal being to use the increase in capitol to eventually buy a KBA tilting table to go along with the molds which would again double production with just a slight labor increase.

MouCo maintains a strong commitment to community and environment. A unique cheese making process used by MouCo allows for reduced utility costs as 80% of the original heat is recaptured, waste is reduced. The company has a goal to become wind-powered in the near future. Robert also employs a unique recycling program for his shipment process he utilizes recycled packaging in the form of a return program where in the recipient of the cheese he ships returns all the packing materials for reshipment, some boxes have traveled over 100,000 miles! The return rate is 50-70%, on average 13 lbs of shipping materials are returned for reuse each time.

MouCo currently has a thriving business supplying the restaurant trade and retail markets such as Whole Foods Market. With the help of his father-in-law, Robert plans to expand his offerings to include new types of cheeses while staying true to his original mission to produce only the highest quality product.

Oogave

Denver, Colorado

Oogave is a line of agave-sweetened sodas that was founded in January 2009 as a natural alternative to commercial sodas. It is currently the only carbonated soda that is sweetened with organic agave nectar. Current flavors are Watermelon Cream, Ginger Ale, Root Beer, Cola, Mandarin-Key Lime, and Grapefruit. Oogave will be using the loan to purchase a labeler, a pasteurizer, and a bib filler, as well as to pay for demos at our stores.

Yummy's Choice

Kansas City, MO

Chef Yahia Kamal has created a number of recipes for Mediterranean foods, such as lebaneh, olive mazza, shatta, and pita chips, which are quite a hit in our Overland Park, Kansas, store. Due to their popularity, the products have expanded from the Denver area to the entire Rocky Mountain region!

In addition to the products' taste and high quality, much of Yummy's Choice's success rests with Chef Kamal's dynamic demonstrations, in which he and his daughter spend three full days at each storeintroducing their foods to shoppers. The loan has helped the company significantly increase its production and distribution capacity.

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