Williams Sonoma and Whole Foods, and was one of the most popular nut-butter brands on Amazon. “[The year 2022] was our best sales year to date. We felt like we were trending in the right direction,” Kanter says. But then the company hit what he describes as a run of incredible bad luck. In early 2019, a Wisconsin-based co-packer the company had used on a one-time basis issued a recall for all products made during that production run, leaving Eliot’s with a loss of 15% of that year’s revenue, putting the company in “a precarious position for several years.” In December the Portland-based co-packer the company primarily used was late fulfilling an order. “It was weeks late, and there were no answers,” he says. The order finally arrived in January; the co-packer, according to Kanter, demanded immediate payment for a separate production run they were also running late with. “This was on, like, a Thursday. Then the following Monday, they let me know, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re closing up shop and moving to Colorado,” Kanter says. He declined to name the co-packer but says the facility again demanded payment for a production run, which ran counter to the terms of their previous agreement. And, he says, there was nowhere else he could go to contract for the production of nut butters locally. “We needed to make a quick decision. There just weren’t any good options,” Kanter says. “It just sort of forced me to make the decision that that was a good run for nineplus years. It wasn’t the way we wanted it to go, but it was time to move on from there.” Kanter announced the closure of Eliot’s Nut Butters this March. Not every story ends as grimly as Kanter’s, but that doesn’t mean they’re great news for Oregon manufacturing, either. Raj Vable founded Young Mountain Tea in his Eugene kitchen in 2013. His company works with farmers in India to get them a better price for tea leaves; leaves are dried and fermented there before being shipped to PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN Aidan Currie, founder and CEO of Portland’s Swift Cider Swift Cider offers co-packing space for other companies to produce small batches of beverages. 20
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