Making “artisan” food is about many things, central Arkansas artisans say, but mostly it’s about community.
That’s not to say the numbers — capital investment, revenue, costs, profit — don’t matter because they do, but strictly making a living isn’t what drives most of Arkansas’ small craft brewers, cheese and sausage makers, chocolatiers, bakers and ice cream artists.
These retailers — who sometimes are also wholesalers — make food in part to make connections and to preserve local culture and traditional methods. But they also saw an opening in the market that their businesses could fill, and they’re working 70 and 80 hours a week to fill it. In the process, they’ve turned into employers and a source of jobs. They’re business people; they’re entrepreneurs.
Michael Roberts edits Arkansas Food & Farm, a guide to local specialty product growers, producers and farmers markets.
He traces the growth in popularity of artisan foods to the Great Recession.
“I think the economic downturn circa 2007 really had a lot to do with the rise in the popularity of artisan goods,” Roberts said. “That may sound odd because artisan goods are generally more expensive, but they are also goods where folks tend to get a better quality product that makes them feel like their dollars are stretching further.
“Another thing that seems to influence people is advertising saturation — fewer people than ever before believe the claims made by television commercials and the like. They do, however, trust their neighbors, so buying a chocolate bar or locally produced honey gives them a sense of comfort: It’s hard for somebody to cheat you with a bad product when they have to look you in the eye to sell it.”
Hillcrest Artisan Meats
Brandon Brown hates the word “artisan” despite its prominence in the name of his business: Hillcrest Artisan Meats, which also happens to make a nifty acronym, HAM.
Brown, most recently from Oregon, owns HAM with his wife, Tara Protiva-Brown, who grew up in Fort Smith. They opened HAM, which sells house-made charcuterie and meats from local farms, in October 2011 in a storefront on Kavanaugh Boulevard in Hillcrest.
Brown has been working in restaurants “since I was old enough to work.” He hated high school and he hated college, but restaurant work meant he could support himself without having a higher education.
As for “artisan,” “I’ve come to hate that term,” Brown said. The chain groceries now offer all kinds of “artisan” foods, he said: “They have artisan Doritos; they have artisan Campbell’s Soup.” The word is now used as a sales tool and its meaning has been debased, Brown said.
“I like ‘local’ more than I like artisan,” he said. “I like supporting local farmers.”
“The thing that we like most about this store is I can tell you pretty much where anything in here came from, protein-wise, meat-wise,” Brown said. “I can tell you that all these animals until the very last day — I think they led happy lives. They’ve been outside doing what animals are supposed to do.”
Factory-raised protein, “pumped full” of antibiotics and growth hormone, isn’t healthy, he said.
He and Tara moved to Little Rock from Eugene, Oregon, because, for one reason, the cost of living was cheaper and also because they saw a need for their kind of butcher shop. “When we came here, there wasn’t really anything like this.”
HAM sells on average 200 to 250 pounds of meat a week and employs three full-time workers and one part-timer, not including Brown and his wife, who each works from 65 to 80 hours a week. “I think people like coming in here and seeing my wife and I here every single day,” he said. “We know everybody’s names and everybody knows our name.”
His best sales come Thanksgiving through Christmas, $12,000 to $18,000 a week, but those include sales of his specialty groceries and sales from his sandwich shop. HAM posted sales of $9,000 one week in early January, usually a slow period.
“We definitely are not getting rich,” Brown said. “You do it because you like it.” And, he noted, his family eats very well and his grocery bill is reasonable.
Arkansas Fresh Bakery
Ashton Woodward started Arkansas Fresh Bakery, located in Bryant, with his father, Walter, and stepmother, Sandy. Ashton, of Little Rock, worked at Satellite Café in high school and went on to culinary school in Chicago, where he lived for six years.
While there, he worked for several companies, most notably Belgian Chocolatier Piron and Bennison’s Bakery, both well-established culinary names.
On returning to Little Rock, Woodward worked at Boulevard Bread Co., though he didn’t have any plans to start a business. Woodward, however, saw a need in the area for a wholesale bakery to serve central Arkansas restaurants.
He opened Arkansas Fresh in February 2012. It didn’t start out as an artisan bakery, but the kinds of accounts that the bakery acquired — the restaurants Ciao Baci and The House, for example — moved it in that direction.
Woodward invested $100,000 to open the bakery, but it’s taken continued investment to grow. “We have kind of grown with the business and added equipment as we were able to,” Sandy Woodward said. “This was a loan-free business,” Ashton said, opened with private investment and no debt.
The bakery’s biggest selling product is the hamburger buns for the Big Orange restaurants. And in November 2014, Woodward started Cocoa Rouge, a hand-crafted chocolate business. Most recently, he’s added Arkansas Fresh Café, also in Bryant, to his list of enterprises.
Arkansas Fresh Bakery has been profitable “off and on,” but Woodward is pouring almost every spare dollar back into the business. “We hope that what we’re building are brands that can last,” he said.
The bakery has 50 to 60 restaurant accounts and also provides products to Verizon Arena, other public venues, hotels and caterers. The three businesses together employ 16. “I’m pretty proud of that, to have 16 employees here in Bryant,” Sandy Woodward said.
“When you think wholesale, you don’t think artisan,” Ashton said. “Previously, what people had to do who wanted any type of artisan bread for their restaurant in the Little Rock area is you had to almost pay retail prices,” he said.
“There were a lot of people who weren’t using artisan breads who would have preferred to, and that’s where I saw the niche,” Ashton said.
For him, an artisan product means no additives, no preservatives; it’s about the nature of the ingredients. “I think the people who make it also greatly contribute to its artisan nature,” he said. “I think that artisan breads, by definition, need to be unique to the place where they are baked.”
“The human element is definitely a part of what makes it artisan,” he added.
Loblolly Creamery
Sally Mengel is co-owner of Little Rock’s Loblolly Creamery with her mother, Laura Frankenstein. She’s been making Loblolly, a small-batch, handcrafted ice cream, since 2011.
Mengel, mostly from north of Boston and St. Louis, followed her parents to Little Rock after she finished college. She was interested in public health and sustainability — her mother is a retired physician — and had owned a coffee cart in college. Mengel wanted to focus on quality, locally sourced food.
But it’s the Green Corner Store on South Main that’s largely responsible for the birth of Loblolly. The store, owned by Shelley Green, opened in 2009. Its décor features vintage pharmacy fixtures.
“Shelley gave me the opportunity to open something food-oriented here,” Mengel said, “and I really wanted to bring back the soda fountain because there used to be a soda fountain in the pharmacy.”
“And I wanted to fit the mission of the Green Corner Store, which is supporting local, sustainable goods,” she said. Mengel wanted to sell ice cream and sodas but couldn’t find something local that would fit the mission of the store. “So I decided to make it myself.”
Mengel works out of a 3,000-SF commercial kitchen in the Quapaw Tower, and Loblolly employs six full and six part-time workers.
Personal investment funded the Loblolly startup, and the company covers its costs but is not yet profitable, though this year it’s moving into the Conway and Cabot markets, among others.
Mengel wasn’t prepared for the success of Loblolly, which she co-founded with her friend Rachel Moore, who helped develop the recipes. Moore left the business in 2013.
“I started this thinking I would have this and that’s it,” she said, pointing to the soda fountain at the Green Corner Store. “Our business plan keeps changing all the time because we didn’t expect to have wholesale. We didn’t expect to have an ice cream truck and have a large catering and special event sector,” Mengel said. “I reacted to the demand,” she said. “I’m very humbled by it. I had no idea.”
Her ice cream includes local products and no artificial coloring or stabilizers, and that attracted customers, who also were happy about supporting a local company.
Loblolly received the support of the close-knit neighborhood on South Main and then “our friends in restaurants started ordering ice cream to put on their menus.”
“I just said yes to everything, which was a learning experience on its own,” Mengel said. “I said yes to any donations or special events. I just tried to get out there as much as I could.”
“We experimented a lot with flavors that we probably won’t ever make again,” she said, including a “honey curry that tasted like taco seasoning.”
Loblolly bought a food truck, which serves as a “rolling billboard.”
Mengel sees Loblolly as the creator of an experience. And because it produces in small batches, it can be creative, even developing custom flavors for catering and parties. “You can commission your food,” she said.
Ice cream is seen as a treat, and artisan ice cream is a special treat, something that can justify its higher price. “Ice cream is kind of like an art form,” Mengel said.
Buying local, seeking to be sustainable is “about taking care of the community and being a good steward of the environment,” she said.
Just the Beginning
Roberts, the magazine editor, thinks the artisan trend will continue.
“If you look at Arkansas, we run a few years behind national trends,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but it means that we are just now at the beginning of the artisan product boom in this state. The great thing about that is that we have so many artisans in Arkansas who have been creating quality products for decades, and now we have a new group of younger artisans who are entering the market.
“And buying local has such a social aspect to it, something that a person can’t get at a big box store or Internet shopping,” Roberts said. “There are conversations that happen; people become friends over the farmers market table. That sense of community is something that we as humans crave, and I think as more people realize they can get that feeling from buying local, you’ll see more communities want to get in on the fun and quality that comes from Arkansas-made artisan products.”
Back at Hillcrest Artisan Meats, Brown said: “There are days when I want to set fire to this place. And then there are days when it makes me really proud and really happy to come to work. It’s work.”
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