the United States to be blended, flavored and packaged in tea bags. At first he had his home kitchen certified as a commercial kitchen; then he worked at a shared kitchen space in Springfield. When he sought to scale up, he couldn’t find a co-packing facility in Oregon that worked at the scale he needed and had the right equipment. He ended up moving production to a facility outside Los Angeles and laying off three people; he and his wife have moved to Michigan, where they run the company remotely. “What it comes down to is — I’ll just say what it is — co-packing is not sexy,” says Anna- Rose Adams, director of business development for Carman Ranch. “It is not what people are graduating school for and saying, ‘Yeah, I want to start a food-manufacturing business.’ The cool technology is in lab-grown meat and efficiency. But in terms of meat-and-potatoes co-packing, there’s no incentive for it to exist, really, in a medium scale.” And sometimes food producers will need to drop or change a product line for reasons far less dramatic than the ones described by Vable and Kanter: According to Adams, one co-packer Carman Ranch has worked with has had to suspend production for a while because of staffing issues. So where do the solutions lie? Adams says often food producers find co-packers simply through word of mouth; there isn’t a centralized repository or database for them. A simple website could make it easier to figure out what facilities are able to manufacture or package what types of food, and how to make contact. That’s part of what ODA is trying to accomplish with the survey, says Erick Garman, the agency’s trade-evelopment manager. “What I’m trying to do is pull all those stories together so that we can have a better conversation, so that some of the industry folks can come together with a proposal or an idea to be presented, so that everybody is kind of on the same page of understanding Build skills in the classroom and the c-suite with Linfield’s Front Office Sports - where students partner with regional sport organizations to develop new programs, run media campaigns and make decisions that impact the game, on and off the field. DISCOVER YOUR UNCOMMON Learn more at linfield.edu/business 23-0142 Oregon Business MagazineAd.indd 1 10/12/23 10:55 AM where can we go from here, and what that looks like,” Garman says. Guerrero says Community Co-Pack NW will lease the other half of her new facility, and will offer manufacturing space to other, smaller manufacturers looking to start out, experiment or scale up. She also believes that — in part due to the rising cost of real estate — policymakers should take a more serious look at supporting co-packing in a sustainable way. “I do think that one of the reasons that it’s almost nonexistent is because it’s pretty hard to make that model work as a viable for-profit business,” Guerrero says of small- and medium-scale co-packers. “We’re really hoping that we can form this partnership and leverage it as a community resource and really look into how can we create a resource in the areas of shared ingredient buying, shared packaging, shared distribution, so that it can be a benefit to many small businesses in the community. And in doing that, we’re hoping that we can leverage some buy-in by the state or the city or something to offset the cost of getting that up and running.” “We’re pretty lucky to be in this state that has so much support for food entrepreneurs,” Garman says. “We’re just here to make it better.” “We’re really hoping that we can form this partnership and leverage it as a community resource. ” NIKKI GUERRERO 21
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