16 Spring 2025 | edibleseattle.com As Convoy Coffee expanded and found a home in a brick-and-mortar shop in Pioneer Square, Rothstein and Johnstone wanted their success to be the success of their peers as well. They looked for pastries to stock at their new coffee shop, wanting to work with businesses that prioritized small, local farms. “We started looking around for bakeries that had amazing sourcing,” Johnstone says. “And we quickly found out it was [few] to none.” Always eager for a new challenge, Rothstein and Johnstone took on locally sourced, seasonal pastries themselves. They developed products like their popular golden, flaky turnovers, filled with rotating seasonal fruits—lovingly named “Valentines”—roasted potato biscuits, seasonal scones and more. While in a period of trying to improve their craft, Johnstone and Rothstein also experimented with sourdough made with local grown and milled grains, like those from Cairnspring Mills, which had just launched in Skagit County. Working with local flour was one of the greatest lessons in baking the self-taught pair could have asked for. “I think for a lot of bakeries, it’s so much about the processes, like ‘how do you do the same recipe every single time?’ and I felt like working with local grain turned that on its head, where if you tried to apply a rule of ‘every single time’ to sourdough, it will not work. You have to really learn how to taste, smell, touch, hone this really awesome, touching relationship with—ultimately—grain, which changes throughout the year,” Johnstone explains. “Bread is such a carnal element,” Rothstein says. “People think of flour as this white, bleached stuff that they get in the grocery store with enrichments in it … “…But it’s oxidizing, and if it’s fresh there’s so many more nutrients available for us, and also the microbes that are living within,” Johnstone says. “Even living flour appears inert to people,” Rothstein adds. The trial and error process also led to deeper connections. They built symbiotic relationships with their farmers, vendors and supporters, trading food for feedback. The valued input from friends, neighbors and shoppers alike encouraged Rothstein and Johnstone to get creative with local ingredients. “We love to say yes to farmers,” Johnstone says of their business philosophy. Some of their most notable products have come from saying yes to farmers. Their eye-catching onion cookie, which marries caramelized onion and snickerdoodle spices, was born from buying end-of-storage onions from a farm they knew from the farmers markets. It was a similar story with Melissa Henderson and Josh Hyatt of Newaukum Valley Farm, who got much of their business from Seattle restaurants and were hit particularly hard when restaurants closed in 2020. Rothstein and Johnstone wanted to figure out a way to redirect as much of their produce as possible to mitigate the damage to the farm by sourcing as much as they could from them. Long-lasting, trusting friendships with farmers like these pushed Rothstein and Johnstone to rethink everything they were doing when the pandemic forced them to close Convoy Coffee in 2020. As farmers markets closed too, losing income for their farmer friends like Henderson and Hyatt, Rothstein and Johnstone began brainstorming how they could keep their staff employed, get produce to people and support farmers without the sales channels they had previously relied on. “Can we somehow facilitate bringing this farm produce to people in Seattle?” Johnstone recalls of their thoughts at the time. The Salmonberry Farm Box was born less than 48 hours after they closed the coffee shop. “It’s like a CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] built up of many small farms, with the goal of being hyper-usable,” Johnstone says. Salmonberry still offers choices of boxes containing produce from local farms, plus add-ons from Salmonberry’s bakery. Their “Essentials Box” includes bread, a beverage and a baked good, like their scones or onion cookies, as well as vegetable crops; the “Farm Box” exclusively contains farm products. What started as a quick fix to get produce to people and payment to farmers during an unprecedented time has evolved into the core of Salmonberry’s business. The pair even began some small-scale farming of their own—a high-density organic microgreens operation that lives inside their Ballard bakery as a means to provide customers with fresh greens even during winter. The model of combining products from various farms, including their own, means that Salmonberry is able to send fresh produce straight to people’s doors every week of In addition to farm-sourced produce, Salmonberry hosts a microgreen operation, which keeps subscribers in fresh greens even in cold seasons.
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