Kyle Jaster | Hrflows

A Talk with Kyle Jaster, Executive Director of Community Food Works

Community Food Works, a not for profit based in Kingston and funded by the NoVo Foundation, has as its mission to make great local food accessible to everyone in the community by building the infrastructure that provides schools and food pantries with access to locally sourced, minimally processed, nutritious food. The organization is attempting to support the redevelopment of a regional food system that once existed in the Hudson Valley by sourcing food from local producers, processing it at local facilities including its mill in Hurley, and distributing it to an expanding network of local institutions.

As Executive Director Kyle Jaster explains it, Community Food Works hopes one day to test its full production supply chain to determine what soil management practices, what crop genetics, and what processing methods deliver optimal nutrient density. He is excited for Community Food Works to one day explore an even farther frontier: how the nutrient content of food can be matched to nutrient density needs as they vary throughout the human lifespan.

Of particular interest for this Hudson River Flows series on the future of food is how the organization is positioning itself on the cutting edge of nutrient-density testing as it undertakes an ambitious partnership with food testing lab Edacious.

Kyle Jaster, Executive Director, Community Food Works

Hudson River Flows: Can you provide an overview of Community Food Works's mission?

Kyle Jaster: Our mission is to make great local food accessible to everyone in our community. "Great" means it tastes great, it's in a package that's usable, it has real health benefits, and it supports the local economy. The way we do that today is by building regional-scale food processing infrastructure that fills a gap in the local supply chain.

I was a farmer for a while, and I've built a number of technology businesses. The most recent one was Harvie, a grocery delivery service for local food. What I found there was that I could get locally made tomato sauce and I could get locally grown tomatoes, but I couldn't get locally made tomato sauce from locally grown tomatoes. The sauce was made here, but the tomatoes in it came from California. And the tomatoes grown here went out as fresh tomatoes - farm stands, restaurants, CSA boxes. Nothing connected the two.

It was the same with wheat. There were bakeries in the valley making beautiful bread, and there were farmers in the valley growing wheat, and the bread was being made from flour milled a thousand miles away. The two halves existed. The middle didn't.

Hudson River Flows: Why does that gap exist?

Kyle Jaster: Food processing businesses are hard and capital intensive, and the small ones get competed out for a number of reasons. Economies of scale are a big one. It's far cheaper per pound to make 50 million pounds of tortilla chips than it is to make 100,000 or 500,000 pounds. A plant running 50 million pounds spreads its equipment, its building, its food safety program and its sales team across 50 million pounds. A plant running 500,000 pounds carries many of the same costs across a hundredth of the volume. Another is that the local supply chain dries up as farms become larger - this means food processors don't have the ability to develop their own supply chains without long term investment in a farming community.

Over about forty years that math closed the small and mid-sized plants. What's left is a handful of very large ones. They aren't near us, and they don't buy from small farms.

Internally, one of the ways we think about it is that local food is stop-and-start traffic and big ag is highway traffic. You need a totally different system to run it - the cars need to look different if they're doing local food.

Hudson River Flows: How does that system have to be different?

Kyle Jaster: A big plant is built to run one product at one spec all day, for years. That's the highway. Everything about it— the equipment, the labor model, the trucks— assumes you never change what you're doing.

Ours changes constantly. Wheat comes in once a year and the protein and other important characteristics are different every harvest. Tomatoes come in over about six weeks.Schools want one pack size, pantries want another. So we build for changeover instead of throughput. Equipment that can switch products each shift. Lines that still run well at small batch sizes. Enough storage to take a crop when it's ready and process it over the following months.

Community Food Works's school bread is 100% whole wheat sourdough, baked by Bread Alone.

Distribution has the same problem. A national brand ships full truckloads into a distribution center. We're making twenty stops at twenty schools with a few cases each.

Different truck, different route, different cost per pound.If you try to run local food on equipment designed for the highway, you can’t adapt to the needs of smaller scale farms.

Hudson River Flows: How is Community Food Works trying to address that gap?

Kyle Jaster: We now own and operate a flour mill in Hurley, and we're in the process of opening another facility at 1155 Flatbush Road, which will be a tortilleria and will make frozen burritos and pizzas for schools and food pantries.

When it runs, the tortilla will be ours end to end: wheat from Hudson Valley farms, milled at our mill in Hurley, pressed at 1155. The beans, the cheese, the sauce and the vegetables will all be locally sourced as well. That's the point of doing it ourselves. If you buy a frozen burrito today, every ingredient in it was chosen by somebody optimizing for price at national scale. We get to choose differently, ingredient by ingredient, and the money goes back into the local farming community.

The vast majority of our food goes into schools and food pantries. We're in about 30 different school districts in and around the Mid-Hudson Valley. We've won four school bids to date, so by the end of the year we'll be in many more schools. We do an enormous amount of work making sure our food tastes great and also, we hope, has the net effect of improving nutrition for kids.

Hudson River Flows: How do you connect successfully with a school district?

Kyle Jaster: It depends on the school food administrator, but we have a bunch of heroes among school food administrators who are doing incredible work. They've been looking for local food and they're excited to buy it. They like buying local, they like buying a product they're proud to serve their kids, and we only tackle products that aren't already available locally.

There was no tortilleria in the Hudson Valley. Nobody was putting up a whole wheat sandwich loaf at a price and a volume a district could actually run five days a week. A food service director can buy a local head of lettuce in September. What they can't buy is a case of diced tomatoes grown here, packed here, and sitting on the shelf in February. That's what we’re working to build.

Community Food Works serves 30 different school districts in and around the Mid-Hudson Valley.

Hudson River Flows: You are able to provide equitable food access because your costs are subsidized by the not for profit underwriting?

Kyle Jaster: Yes. About 60 percent of our products go to food pantries and we donate those 100 percent - the pantries pay nothing. We are in 40 of the 53 food pantries in Ulster County as of right now.

For schools, our prices match the prices a big industrial production volume can meet. We sell our bread to schools at $1.19 a loaf. Our school bread is 100 percent whole wheat, and this year all of the wheat came from Hudson Valley farms. That won't be true next year, because it’s been a difficult growing year for wheat —so I'm not saying it will always be that way, but all of our flour is always New York State Grown & Certified.

Hudson River Flows: Can you explain why you started working with the food-testing lab, Edacious?

Kyle Jaster: There are a lot of people who say local food is better for you, but we reallywant to know what makes it better. We're making decisions every day— which wheat variety we buy, how we mill it, how long the dough ferments— and every one of them has a cost attached. We were making those decisions on received wisdom. Edacious is how we find out which ones actually matter.

Local food also isn't automatically more nutritious, and some of what makes it local makes the nutrition harder to control. A big mill needing a 12 percent protein flour pulls from fifty lots across five states and blends to spec. We have the wheat that grew here this year, and this year the protein came in low. It’s harder for us to blend our way out of a bad protein year, so what's in our flour moves with the weather. Enriched white flour has iron and B vitamins added back after milling —whole wheat generally isn't enriched, and most small mills don't have the equipment to do it anyway. So our flour has more of what's in the grain and none of what gets added back in. Whether that nets out better or worse is exactly the kind of question we couldn't answer on our own.

And we want to give the answers away. Testing at this level is expensive, and a farm or a small processor can’t afford to spend a lot to find out whether their milling temperature matters, or if the genetic variations between two varieties of wheat really make the difference on vitamin D or selenium to justify a lower yield. We can spend it, because we're a nonprofit and this is part of our contribution to the larger local food community. If we figure out that four or five specific practices move the needle, that should be public, so the next person can act on it without paying to learn it again.

Hudson River Flows: What are some of the questions you want answered?

Kyle Jaster: We came at this with a lot of questions and a lot of humbleness, saying: we don't know. There's a lot of received wisdom— oh, it's stone-milled, so it's better for you. I don't know if that's true. Or it's grown organically, or with regenerative practices. Well, what makes a practice regenerative? And how do we know? Does it show up? When I make a tomato sauce, does it actually show up as higher calcium or more iron? What are we actually seeing? It's very hard and very expensive to test for this, so a lot of it ends up being finger-wagging. Our work with Edacious is designed to answer a lot of those questions— it's going to take a while. These are questions we have as producers.

Our big project with Edacious started small. I like to start small, figure a couple of things out, and then expand. We're not doing the full battery of tests on every product yet; we're stepping up to it.

We started last year with a series of tests on flour. We also co-manufacture - our school bread is baked by Bread Alone, and Nels Leader and his team have been a real partner in this. So our first question for Edacious was: is this bread better, and in what ways is it better or worse than the other breads in the schools?

Where we were a real standout was glycemic index, which ranks how quickly and how much a food raises blood sugar, on a scale where pure glucose is 100. Under 55 is low, 56 to 69 is mid-range, 70 and up is high. The commodity sandwich bread that shows up in most school cafeterias tests around 87. Ours came back at 67 - 100 percent whole wheat, and it's a sourdough, which is doing a lot of the work. That takes it from high glycemic to mid-range, which is pretty impressive for bread.

The school food administrators Community Food Works partners with are proud to serve their kids local food.

Hudson River Flows: What will be your next steps with Edacious?

Kyle Jaster: The next one is testing the full supply chain with Edacious. This year, we're testing the wheat of all the farmers that supply us as it comes off the field and sending it to them. They're looking at genetics— which variety of wheat did they use?— and at a handful of key metrics around growing practices. What was in the field before? Everyone we work with is organic, but are they doing no-till or low-till? What's the suite of practices happening around here, and which ones did you use in your field?

Then we test after we mill and after we bake. There are things you can do in the milling step that change the type of damage you do to the starches in the flour, and that changes the nutritional profile in some ways. There are things you can do in sifting - even in whole wheat you'll get some bran out— and how hot it gets when you're milling may have an impact. We don't know. And then the baking side: what oils you use, how long you're fermenting, what type of yeast is in there. All of that has an impact on glycemic index and on the availability of different nutrients.

Hudson River Flows: How will you "sift" through all these variables to get clarity on the levers of nutrient density?

Kyle Jaster: What I'm really interested in - where I think there are a lot of open questions - is: what are those five or six activities, whether it's selecting a wheat variety, a growing practice, a milling practice, whatever, that really move the needle on specific nutrients? And what are the costs of that?

Everything has tradeoffs. Those could be yield, protein percent - there's a whole host of variables. The question is whether they're acceptable. If we pick a wheat variety because it tests higher on minerals, it might yield 15 percent less per acre, and the farmer eats that. If we sift harder to hit a texture the schools will actually eat, we take out bran. Every lever has a cost somewhere, and usually the cost lands on somebody other than the person pulling the lever. That's the part worth being careful about.

And then, which of those levers actually matter in our context? How much of a given nutrient is the right amount? What do you want as a Daily Value in a tortilla chip? Daily Value is the reference number on the nutrition facts panel - the FDA's benchmark for how much of a nutrient a person should get in a day, and the panel tells you what percent of that a serving delivers. You don't want 150 percent of anything in a chip; maybe you want 20 percent. That's a design decision.

We're at the very early stages of knowing what variables we can push on, how we can push on them, and which ones we want to push toward the outcomes we want. We look at the general population of kids in America and what kids need from a vitamin perspective. The right amount of a B vitamin is different at different ages— if you're nine to thirteen you need a different amount of B1 than at fourteen to eighteen. So we're working on understanding who our audience is. Are we making a baby food, where we want to focus on one set of nutrients? Or a sandwich bread, where we care about the fourteen-to-eighteen group and we're seeing a regional gap in the availability of certain vitamins - and we work on that for that product.

Hudson River Flows: Once a farm or producer has established a baseline for its nutritional density does it have to keep retesting?

Kyle Jaster: It really depends. Here's a simple example: we already do some nutritional testing. The easy one everybody in the flour industry does is protein percent. The reason is that it also affects your baking outcomes— higher protein means higher gluten, and higher gluten means stretchier flour that you can put more air into.

So we do that nutritional test every day, and any mill is doing it very regularly, because they know their bakers are going to yell at them if the protein percent goes off. That's a pretty good indicator that there's variability in protein percent and you want to test regularly. I don't think it would be different for any other nutrient or vitamin. If we decided as a system that we care a lot about vitamin B3, you'd want to test for it about as regularly as you test for protein.

Operating a few different food product lines - we have tomato sauce, tortilla chips, flour, bread— we have a co-manufacturer for tortilla chips, and we have to check the thickness on those chips every two weeks. If equipment drifts a little, or the wire gets set wrong, or a new person sets it up, the chips can get too heavy and nobody wants to eat them. That's true of any line anywhere; it's why you check.

So testing, and the ability to drop the price of testing, opens the door for a lot of this work in a way that 40 years ago we couldn't make the argument for, because it was just impossible.

Hudson River Flows: How do you think about the future of nutrient testing?

Kyle Jaster: We're really early. The way I tell the story is that twenty years ago it probably cost $25,000 to do one of the tests we're doing on a lot of wheat, and now it costs me $2,500. But until it costs $25, or 25 cents, it's really hard to get anybody to think this is doable. We're surfing down that cost curve right now - the technology is getting better and cheaper and faster.

Five or ten years from now— I don't know the specific date - the cost of these tests will be low enough that we should be able to expect, as consumers, that products are actually assayed.
Right now, most nutrition facts panels are built from database values rather than from testing the finished product. That's standard practice and it's permitted, but it means the number on the panel is an estimate. That's true for us too, on products where we don't have our own test data - we use the USDA database, which tells you what's typically in a tomato, not what's in ours. Direct testing is expensive, which is why almost nobody does it at every step.

Hudson River Flows: A lot of venture capital is flooding into nutrient testing startups and the big national brands are jumping on the nutrient density bandwagon. Will that create the situation we've had before with "organic," where the big food companies co-opted and watered down what it means, which eroded public confidence? How does the small scale grower and producer compete when the day comes that the national brands get good at marketing nutrient density?

Kyle Jaster: If you're a brand whose focus is local, I don't know that I'd go all in on "because we're local, we're better nutrition." I don't think that's necessarily true. If you're a small brand and you want to be ahead of the curve— which is a great place to be as a smaller brand— that works for a while. And then you decide: are you going big and leaning into this, or are you pivoting constantly and trying to raise the bar? That's what a lot of small farms do. They're constantly raising the bar on what good agriculture looks like, because if you're small, you have to be ahead of the curve to differentiate yourself.

Organic is the clearest example. Twenty-five years ago a small farm could put "certified organic" on a sign and that was the differentiator. Then it became a national program, the large players came in, the price premium narrowed, and the label stopped telling a customer much about that particular farm. The farms that stayed ahead moved to the next thing. No-till. Pasture-raised. Naming the varieties they grow instead of just the category. Selling direct, so the customer knows whose farm it is and can go stand on it.

The pattern is that a differentiator has a shelf life. Once it's codified and the big companies can meet the letter of it, you need a new one. That's tiring, but it's the job.

Hudson River Flows: So the story about the nutrients is only part of the story you're going to have to tell. Ultimately, if the industrial ag and food system catches up in some way— say you're talking to an institutional buyer— how do you talk to them about the value of purchasing your bread over a national brand that purports to offer the same nutrient profile?

Kyle Jaster: I really hope everyone gets to eat really nutritious food. If the outcome is that a bunch of large consumer packaged goods brands start focusing on the same nutrients we're focusing on, that's awesome. I would love for every kid in America to eat healthier meals. I'm not worried about it. I think it's a net good.

If I were running a business where I needed to be competitive in the market and I wanted to stay small, nutrition would be only one piece of a larger story I'd be telling. That story would also include: what's the local economic impact, what's the resiliency impact, what's the relationship we want to have to our land and our community? Do we want farmers coming in off the field who care what it smells like, because they live in the community too? Or are we fine with multinational companies telling our community what it's going to smell like and what the water quality is going to be, with nobody responsible who has enough authority to actually change things?

Or are we good, as a nation, with the fact that a handful of meat processing plants produce most of the meat we eat, and if one of them goes down the shelves go empty? If you're not comfortable with that, there's an alternative - more facilities around here, more integrated into the community.

That requires a different set of priorities than the ones we have now. Right now, what we ask a small regional baker to do is make a better product, do it without the efficiency of scale, and charge as close as possible to the price of somebody who has all the efficiencies of scale and a lower-quality product. Nobody decided that on purpose. It's just what a system optimized for cheap produces. What we're trying to do at Community Food Works is show what it looks like when you optimize for something else - when the priorities are nutrition, and the farms around you, and whether the thing gets eaten.