Kelly Phelps
l.-r.: Dill pickles, Cherry tomatoes, Polish dill pickles, Zucchini Bread and Butter pickles, Dilly beans and Spicy Crabapples.
When Four Lakes Processing Collective launched about four months ago, founding member Kendra Allen didn’t know the first thing about pickling. In fact, she didn’t know the first thing about pickles — including that the most common sort is made from cucumbers. So when a local farmer showed up with 35 bushels (that’s about 1,680 pounds) of produce, Allen had to learn quickly — and on a massive scale.
“I was like, ‘How are we going to do this?’” she recalls, laughing. “But I cooked them up, and they were delicious.”
Four Lakes Processing Collective is a new, nonprofit worker collective run out of the Food Enterprise & Economic Development (FEED) Kitchen on Madison’s north side. Essentially a contract packing service aimed at farmers, growers and other local food producers, the collective offers an array of processing options, including pickling, canning, freezing and drying. Many Four Lakes clients sell the value-added products made by the collective at local farmers’ markets and supermarkets.
Allen became involved with the collective due to her friendship with Joe Mingle, co-founder of Healthy Food For All, a nonprofit food-recovery program that collects excess produce from farms and prepared foods from corporate cafeterias and distributes the haul to food pantries and low-income neighborhoods around Madison. Mingle’s work as a food activist and former grower helped him identify the need for a contract packing service in Madison, but he’s reluctant to take credit for the idea. “It was a need that was very obvious,” he says.
When Four Lakes began, members didn’t know what kind of response they’d get. They sent out a few notices via email lists of Dane County Farmers’ Market producers and FairShare Community Supported Agriculture Coalition members. They initially received only two responses, but the work quickly piled up.
“Mary [Uselman] from Don’s Produce called us up and said, ‘I have a few cucumbers, I’m wondering if you guys can make them into pickles,’” Mingle says. “Then she shows up with 35 bushels. Because from a farmer’s perspective, that’s just a few cucumbers.”
Four Lakes members realized they needed help ironing out the business side of the operation, so they employed students from Edgewood College to come up with a plan for pricing and scaling operations. The collective stayed busy through the end of growing season, processing everything from crabapples to zucchinis. Now that the harvest is over, they’re focusing on creating sauces, salsas and jams — and preparing for next year. “We’re trying to get organized so that next season we can provide services to a lot more people,” Mingle says.
The Four Lakes Processing Collective raises funds for Healthy Food For All and offers living-wage employment for a team of about five people. None of the workers make less than $13 per hour; most have criminal records or other issues that would typically create barriers to employment. Mingle says the mission of providing employment opportunities is as important as the collective’s role in helping small producers and strengthening the local food infrastructure:
“I think the most compelling part of our story is creating these alternative career paths.”
