Sunday, April 16, 2000
Franklin; A Weekly Magazine about the County
A knack with snacks; Buckland businessman debt-free and diversified
by Kathleen Litchfield

Michael Garfield-Wright formulated it. His 8-year-old daughter, Leah, named it. And now, people all over the country are eating it, one little square chunk at a time.

Five years ago, when Garfield-Wright of Buckland envisioned the all-natural, dairy-free snack-food he invented, “Chunks of Energy,” he had hopes his small business – Dancing Star Farms – would be successful.

In the first year of business, he sold 2,000 pounds of his “Chunks of Energy,” which are small square bars, aesthetically resembling granola, that are comprised of seeds, nuts, fruits, fruits juices, natural extracts and flavors, spirulina, an organic form of Hawaiian-grown blue-green algae. Today, he said, he is selling about 50,000 pounds of “Chunks of Energy” in seven varieties each year.

“The first year, I made $27,000. The second year, about $50,000. Now I’m expecting to do over $400,000 this year,” said the 55-year-old entrepreneur, flipping through order sheets he filled last week from customers in states including Vermont, Maine, New York, Georgia, Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.

He attributes the survival of his small business to living a “debt-free” life and to diversification. In addition to his trademarked “Chunks of Energy,” Garfield-Wright also sells blue-green algae and distributes several varieties of granola for a Whately-based natural foods manufacturer.

Garfield-Wright said he decided to combine his 20 years of experience in the natural-foods business, five years on Wall Street, eight years teaching natural-foods cooking in Cambridge, and many years as a personal financial consultant to start his own natural-foods business in 1990.

“I’ve always had that energy to be an entrepreneur. I’ve always wanted to do things my own way and I also had unlimited energy and good money management skills that I wanted to use,” said Garfield-Wright. “My most successful trait is my intuition. I have really good intuition in making business decisions.”

When he was four years out of college, working on Wall Street in the heart of New York City, Garfield-Wright said he was sitting in Grand Central Station one day and read an article in the Wall Street Journal about natural foods. Intrigued, he said he began integrating natural foods into his diet. The same year, with a loan from a friend’s father, Garfield-Wright founding a small natural-snack-foods business in New York called “Green Thumb Natural Foods.”

He sold the business, returned to his native Boston and worked for a chain called Nature Food Centers and began teaching cooking classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and the Boston Center for Education at Tufts University. He married in 1978 and moved to Franklin Country in 1980 to get out of the city.

“We wanted to assume sort of an alternative lifestyle, where we could do a number of homesteading activities,” he said, raising their children in a rural environment, chopping firewood, planting an organic vegetable garden and canning on 26 acres of land in Conway, where they built a post-and-beam house and lived for 10 years. Garfield-Wright then worked in Greenfield while his wife, Susan, directed the Valley Play School in Shelburne Falls.

“It really seemed nice to be connected to the earth and have some control about how we were living,” he said. “We weren’t dependent on anybody. Living out here really fit into our lifestyle.”

From 1983 to 1993, Garfield-Wright worked at Bread & Circus in management and purchasing, traveling extensively throughout the country buying natural foods in bulk, always on the lookout for new an innovation products, he said.

“After that, I started getting bored intellectually and…needed to make a change,” he said. He bought 100 acres of land in the woods of Buckland that held a large house suitable for his growing family, a wooden sugarhouse and “a phenomenal sugar bush,” he said.

Garfield-Wright then learned from the farm’s previous owner, Bill Wall, how to tap maple trees and boil sap into syrup.

“It really becomes part of your being,” Garfield-Wright said. “Every spring now, you’re checking the temperatures. When the sun starts getting warm in February, you know it’s time. It makes me feel much more connected to the outdoors.”

Today, Garfield-Wright produces about 150 gallons of syrup annually and has converted a portion of the original sugarhouse into an office for his growing Dancing Star Farms.

While he manages the business, takes orders and markets his natural-food products, his wife handles bookkeeping and “keeps me organized.”

Their three daughters – Hannah, 19; Leah, 13, and Sylvia, 9 – eat the “Chunks of Energy” regularly he said.

While “Chunks of Energy” got its name when Leah and her dad were driving in the car one day brainstorming about it, Dancing Star Farms got its name from a favorite quote of Susan’s by 19th century philosopher Nietzsche: “You need chaos in your life to produce a dancing star.”

“It means you have to be agitated to do something,” Garfield-Wright said, which was true of his yearning to produce a unique and healthy natural-foods product that people would enjoy.

“I believe in selling people healthy foods and I believe in total honesty. The honesty is totally the most important thing. My goal is just to help everybody eat better foods. But people have to be ready to eat them. They have to be wanting to examine their food choices and make some changes.”

Garfield-Wright’s first “Chunk of Energy” was a “Carob with Fruit” variety, mad of sunflower, sesame and pumpkin seeds, honey, carob powder, peanuts, cashews, peanut butter, pineapple, papaya, vanilla extract and spirulina. His other six varieties are peanut butter-chocolate, carob ginseng, vanilla almond, mixed berry, raspberry ginger and espresso-chocolate.

All the “Chunks of Energy” are dairy-free, high in protein, free of genetically modified organisms (GMO), preservative-free, sugar-free, and most flavors are salt-free. Vanilla almost is also peanut-free.

Garfield-Wright sells “Chunks of Energy,” which are made on the West Coast, in McCusker’s Market in Shelburne Falls, Green Field’s Market in Greenfield, Bread & Circus in Hadley, Cornucopia Foods in Northampton and at foot cooperatives in Brattleboro and Putney, Vt.

“They’re very popular with kids and with hikers,” Garfield-Wright said. “The kids really like them because they taste good and the hikers like them because they hold up well in a backpack and provide them with energy in a compact little bar.”

Three of Garfield-Wright’s seven flavors have spirulina, an organic form of Hawaiian-grown blue-green algae that Garfield-Wright has been eating for 10 years because he feels it boosts his immune system, gives him energy and has a high mineral content.

In addition to eating it regularly, Garfield-Wright sells blue-green algae in powder and tablet forms for a Whately-based company called New England Natural Bakers Inc. Many of his local customers who enjoy his “Chunks of Energy” also purchase the blue-green algae and the 20 varieties of granola and 12 varieties of trail mixes he also sells for New England Natural Bakers, he said.

“Diversification is the key,” he said. “What I realize being in business is that you sort of tap into unlimited amounts of opportunities once you understand the principles of business, pricing things right and giving people really good customer service…I meet their needs, solve their problems and guarantee the product 100 percent. Having really good customer relations is very important. Plus I think people pick up on my passion for what I do.”

To further diversify, Garfield-Wright is in the process of creating a new product: energy bars for dogs in several shapes and flavors with brewer’s yeast, which is high in protein and B vitamins, he said. It is also test-marketed by the year old family dog, Maggie.

“Maggie loves it. She picks this one over a commercial brand,” he said.

Garfield-Wright plans to hire one or two like-minded employees for Dancing Star Farms to assist in the packing and shipping of orders and launching an Internet-based business.

Garfield-Wright has registered a domain name, “organicequity.com,” on the World Wide Web through which he plans to develop an “e-commerce venture to facilitate consolidation in the natural-products industry,” working with companies that have less than $10 million in sales and are struggling to compete with larger natural-foods corporations. His plan is to help them develop strategic partnerships to better market and sell their products.

As a bit of advice from his own experience, Garfield-Wright encourages anyone interested in starting their own business to be realistic in their expectations and to have extensive experience in their field.

“Then it will be fun,” he said. “I’ve never in my life been any (job) situation when I had to look at the clock to see the hours passing. My only problem is I don’t have enough time to get everything done. I look forward to getting up every day and I think my customers sense my enthusiasm and that makes all the difference.”