HVADC Client: Beth’s Farm Kitchen

In a food industry obsessed with scaling fast, Beth's Farm Kitchen has always had a different priority — building something that lasts.

The Old Chatham company has grown carefully and deliberately. When co-owners Jodie Emmett and Guillermo A. Maciel bought the 42-year-old brand in November 2016, they weren't just acquiring a popular line of jams, sauces and spreads. This was their first step in building infrastructure — a co-manufacturing platform to help small food entrepreneurs get to market while creating new demand for local agricultural products.

"We can grow produce and make a living at it, yet it’s very challenging," Maciel said. "We needed to add value to what we were growing, and we needed to help other people find and add value too."

They started in roughly 500 square feet of production space. Essentially, a house kitchen. Today, Beth's Farm Kitchen operates from a 5,000-square-foot facility, works with more than 68 client brands and is in the middle of a major equipment expansion financed in part through HVADC.

A Model Built to Lift Other Boats

Rather than compete with the Hudson Valley's growers, Maciel and Emmett wanted to multiply what those growers could do.

"We wanted to increase the consumption of local and regional produce," Maciel said. "It's a problem that all farmers have — how do you get your start and how do you expand or increase that market share?"

Their answer was co-manufacturing: a facility that could take a farmer's excess peppers, a chef's hot sauce recipe or a food entrepreneur's idea and turn it into a shelf-stable, retail-ready product. The company's minimum order quantity is 120 units — low enough to attract producers getting their start at a farmers’ market or landing their first accounts at Whole Foods or a regional chain. Today Beth’s Farm Kitchen handles everything in a jar: hot sauces, jams, pickles, chutneys, chili crisp, specialty condiments and more.

Many of Beth's Farm Kitchen's co-packing clients arrive with little more than an idea. "We help people throughout their process, develop their recipe, provide them cost analysis and all the way to getting their schedule process that verifies their products are shelf stable and food safe," Maciel said.

About 70% of clients are from New York or neighboring states. Co-packing now accounts for 60% of revenue — up from 50% just 18 months ago. The brand itself is still growing, with a presence online, many a country store in the region, Whole Foods markets across the north East and in NYC’s living room - the Union Square Greenmarket every Friday and Saturday.

The Bridge That Made It Work

Last year, Beth's Farm Kitchen received a $250,000 New York State Grown & Certified grant — managed through the New York Farm Viability Institute — to purchase an automated filling and capping line, cold storage and produce processing equipment. Expenses related to that grant program are reimbursable upon project completion. To finance it up front, they turned to HVADC for a bridge loan.

"The valuable thing about HVADC is that the commitment from the state as a funding entity means something to them," Maciel said. "They were able to use that promise toward backing the loan — and that was truly essential."

Funding for HVADC's loan was made possible through the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA). For Emmett, working with a local, mission-aligned lender stood in sharp contrast to the predatory financing offers that small businesses face every day.

"To actually work with a team that's local, invested in the community and that you can trust just takes a lot of stress out of it," Emmett said. "People dangle financial carrots in front of you all day, but there's always a catch."

“Beth’s Farm Kitchen is exactly the kind of business we want to work with,” said Taylor Mignone, HVADC’s and Farm and Food Growth Fund’s (FFGF) Business Services Manager. “They are building infrastructure for a lot of other agribusinesses, and they had a commitment from the state to back it up. The bridge loan let them move forward without giving up control of their business.”

Sneaking Local Produce Into Everything

The new filling line isn't the only piece of the expansion. Part of the grant also funds a second freezer unit, allowing the team to buy local produce at peak harvest, process and freeze it, then pull it out throughout the year — helping farmers extend the value of their crops well beyond peak harvest season.

In many cases, farmers sell products under their own labels while Beth's Farm Kitchen handles production behind the scenes. The company sources habaneros and sweet peppers from Blue Star Farm in Stuyvesant, for example, and uses the same base across several clients' private-label products — effectively multiplying the market for one farm's harvest.

"We're trying to create better than living wage jobs in the Hudson Valley and sneak as much local produce into every recipe we can," Maciel said.

Beth's Farm Kitchen is also a member of HVADC's Hudson Valley Bounty program, a regional searchable portal connecting buyers and consumers with local agricultural producers.

The Right Size Is Everything

The new equipment could increase production capacity tenfold — but growth at Beth's Farm Kitchen has never been about chasing scale for its own sake.

"What's very hard for people at our level is to make that leap to the next level of production and grow into it at a rate that makes sense," Emmett said.

Beth's Farm Kitchen has survived the pandemic, the Great Recession and the Great Resignation largely by staying scrappy and self-funded. The company currently employs nine people, with an emphasis on internal training and advancement.

"Cash is king," Maciel said. "You can have good value, good customers and a really hard-working workforce. But there's a real need for capital that isn't going to try to own your business."

For Maciel, the relationship with HVADC represents more than a single transaction — it's part of something larger.

"We're not trying to replace people with machines," he said. "We're trying to find the right equipment that fits the size of our company and our team, so that their jobs are efficient and also the least harmful to their bodies as possible."

"If you don't invest in small- and medium-scale farms and food businesses, your regional food system will fall apart," he added. "We're trying to build something that helps grow our regional economy and partnerships, one employee, one farmer and one business owner at a time.”

To learn more about the HVADC Agribusiness Loan Fund, visit https://www.hvadc.org/ag-loans-agribusiness-loan-fund.