Tuesday, May 30, 2006
The Recorder, front page, Greenfield, Mass.
Taking a ‘chunk’ out of the big guys
by Richie Davis

The large barn off a quiet stretch of Avery Road is hardly what you’d expect as the home of a nationally selling snack with nearly $2 million in expected sales this year.

But this is where Michael Garfield-Wright first got “turned on” to the potential of eating spirulina, a blue-green algae, to perk him up when he was boiling down maple syrup more than a decade ago.

And Garfield-Wright, who talks about his “Chunks of Energy” with all the gung-ho enthusiasm of someone who might have just eaten a bagful of them, is the kind of health-food zealot you’d expect to be the driving force behind the improbable snack food that looks like something you’d feed to your gerbil but is loaded with treats like pistachios, honey, or berries.

“I’m persistent and have the passion to sell the product,” said Garfield-Wright, the 61-year-old former Wall Street commodities broker who traded his nine years of developing trail mixes for Bread & Circus into a start-up that keeps going.

His chunks – in nine flavors, from “carob ginseng with goji berries” to “18 carob greens” – are already in Whole Foods Markets, 22 small health-food chains and dozens of independent food markets around the country. They’re about to get a big boost by being added to four additional Rocky Mountain and West Coast distribution warehouses and 30 stores in the giant Wild Oats chain.

Yet you’d never guess it by visiting Dancing Star Farm, where he and his family have lived since 1990, since all of the manufacturing of the dairy-free, wheat-free, soy-free snacks goes on in California and British Columbia and distribution is handled by warehouse around the country.

When he decided to leave his Boston job, he remembers, “My goal was to develop $200,000 markets for small products, niches that wouldn’t get copied, that would be enough to support a business.”

Starting in 1995, Garfield-Wright has honed his recipe for the seaweed based snacks and kept current by keeping his eye on the marketplace.

To do that, he distributes granola and trail mix products for Greenfield-based New England Natural Bakers and does frequent sampling of Chunks of Energy in stores to try new recipes – like a reformulated pineapple ginger, to replace raspberry ginger – and gauge consumer reaction.

“If you talk to 200 customers and can get 10 people to jump up and down about the product and another 25 to be positive, you’ve got a winner,” he’s advised other start-up food businesses. “Otherwise, you need to do more work.”

He got that enthusiastic reaction from seven or eight people a couple of weeks ago while sampling carob-spirulina and honey-pistachio chunks for 150 Brattleboro Food Co-op customers.

His hands-on involvement differs from the picture he paints of the way big companies have developed products. “They had all of these committees with MBAs, and they’d sit around generating ideas. But they found that wasn’t effective; it was detached from reality.”

Instead, Garfield-Wright depends on intuition, after talking with people at 20 or more annual demonstrations at stores and trade shows. Still, he insists that if entrepreneurs invested more research in the product-development phase of their businesses, they wouldn’t have to work as hard marketing later.

He says that the small, niche markets he’s going after – vegan, gluten-free, raw products – are under the radar screens of large corporations for which energy bars have become a major product line.

Philip Morris has its Balance bar, Kellogg’s has its Kashi bar and Nestle has its Power bar.

“When you go into the mass market, candy bar companies have tremendous control of shelf space,” says Garfield-Wright. “They’d want a $5 million to $10 million market for one bar. “I’d develop a product for a quarter-million-dollar market, with grass-roots marketing, and create demand for product with a unique flavor or product profile. That’s been my approach.”

Some energy snack manufacturers, he says, “pump up the bar” with soy or other nutritious ingredients but which require masking agents to hide foul tastes.

When it comes to mixing up the ingredients, Garfield-Wright seems to be inspired by the very Dancing Star words of Freidrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.” His “18 carob greens” chunks blend organic alfalfa juice, wheat grass, barley grass, oat grass, spirulina, cracked cell chlorella, dandelion greens, broccoli and broccoli sprouts, spinach, kale, parsley, cauliflower, sea kelp, sea dulse sea vegetables, and stevia.

Packaging presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Chunks, which can’t be sold by Stop & Shop or other conventional supermarket chains (although the Hadley Super Stop & Shop has them in bulk bins). Although he’s weighting biodegradable packing options, Garfield-Wright takes advantage of bulk merchandising as a selling point, since it’s an environmental plus and lowers costs.

A pound of Chunks sells for half the price of the mainline energy bars, he says. “You’re getting much less packaging, and there’s minimal environmental waste.”

With the top-selling bulk snack food sold by United Natural Foods – the national distribution giant that handles two-thirds of Dancing Star’s sales and can trace its roots back to Greenfield’s Llama Toucan and Crow Trading Co. in the 1970’s –Garfield-Wright says he’s one of the few manufacturers who is allowed to handle his own accounts, rather than go through a food broker. That avoids losing $60,000 in profits, about three-quarters of which he applies to constant promotions of different flavors.

Sales topped $1.2 million last year, Garfield-Wright said, and with the addition of a slew of West Coast Whole Foods and Wild Oats markets this year contributing to sales of an expected 500,000 pounds of Chunks of Energy this year, he’s projecting next year’s sales could being approaching $3 million.

The Buckland entrepreneur, who also becomes the Shelburne Falls Area Business Association president for the coming year, is planning to add a 10th flavor to his Chunks line-up, as well as three organic flavors in the next three months, and he’s also looking into ways of making the products available to colleges, as they now are at the University of Minnesota.

It’s also offered as a dessert item at the Whole Foods salad bar in Hadley, boosting sales there by 35 percent.

With 10 e-mail requests a week from customers wanted to know where they can find his Chunks –many from people who have tasted them while on vacation in Vermont, or Arizona or New Mexico – Garfield-Wright says more than half his sales are through independent stores or small chains.

Those stores, the Green Field’s Markets and McCuskers’ of the world, will face greater and greater pressure from chains like Whole Foods and even Wal-Mart, which is getting into organic foods big-time.

“The ones that are well-managed can pick up products that are dropped by Whole Foods,” he said, the niche products like his, which fall through the cracks.

As someone who deals with retailers huge and small with unique products, Garfield-Wright sees himself at an advantage because of a loyal Chunks following.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” he said, especially from chains that demand to see his sales grow. “If you have passion and totally understand the industry, it helps.”