Fairfield Food Collective’s business booming

FAIRFIELD – The former Harper Brush building on North Second Street in Fairfield has attracted one entrepreneur after another to start a food business in the building, which was remodeled in recent years to include six kitchens.

The building is owned by Eric and Denyce Rusch, and Denyce’s son Galen Saturley and his wife, Liza. Together they have formed the Fairfield Food Collective to oversee the building’s tenants, which includes Breadtopia, the business the family launched in 2006.

Breadtopia was previously housed in the old Hawthorne Direct building on the west side of town, but Galen said the family had a chance to move into the former Harper Brush building on North Second Street and seized the opportunity in 2019.

The new location allowed the business to expand from 5,000 square feet to 40,000 square feet. Breadtopia is an online retail store that sells the raw materials for bread, and the kitchen supplies to make it. Breadtopia mills its own grain at its location at 400 N. Second St.

At first, the business did not sell baked goods, only ingredients, but its sales were so good that the owners were able to expand by creating a separate business, Breadtopia Bakehouse, using the grains that Breadtopia sold.

Saturley said Breadtopia has scrambled to meet the high demand for its products, which has only grown during the pandemic.

“When COVID hit, everyone wanted sourdough starter,” Saturley said. “We had to go from five employees to 25 to keep up with all the orders. We’ve taken those profits we’ve earned during the pandemic and invested them to support job growth and add to the thriving food scene Fairfield already had.”

Saturley said one of the reasons Breadtopia moved into its new home is that people from all over the country wanted to visit it, but it had no storefront in the old location.

“We were just a warehouse,” Saturley said. “We wanted a retail space, so we bought this building to create a bakery and make it an incubator for local food producers.”

The building had no kitchens when the Fairfield Food Collective moved in, but its owners have since installed six. They are all being used. The start-ups that now call that building home include the bakery Wholly Patisserie, the bakery Marmalade Sky, the taco-themed restaurant Taco Dreams, and Grassmoon Provisions, a bakery that offers “Primal and Keto compliant food products.”

The Fairfield Food Collective has no plans to stop its expansion. Saturley said there’s space to add a seventh kitchen, which will be geared toward caterers who need to rent space for a weekend at a time.

“We want to develop a studio kitchen to hold classes and bring in professional bakers,” Saturday said.

The business is planning to host an Israeli food truck in its parking lot three days a week that will serve falafel and shawarma (a Middle Eastern wrap), among other things.

The Fairfield Food Collective’s most recent acquisition was three freeze dryers. Bob Ferguson, director of the Sustainable Living Coalition, said he was approached a few years ago about investing in freeze dryers.

The Sustainable Living Coalition, its members, and other donors teamed up with the Fairfield Food Collective to purchase the freeze dryers, which are housed in the collective’s building. Each machine cost $3,300, and the two groups see that as an investment that will pay off in the long-term.

The freeze dryers can be rented by the public. Saturley said that, eventually, the Fairfield Food Collective wants to employ someone who will dedicate their full attention to preparing food for the freeze dryers, so that clients need only drop off items from their garden and return to pick up the package.

Saturley said freeze drying preserves about 95 percent of the nutrients in food while dramatically lengthening its shelf-life. For instance, he said that if freeze dried food is kept in a Mylar bag with an oxygen absorber, it can last 25 years. He said that canning, another method for making foods shelf-stable, is not as good because more nutrients are lost in the canning process.

Saturley said just about anything can be freeze dried as long as it does not contain alcohol or too much sugar. So far, the FFC has been freezing mostly vegetables, but Saturley is working on freeze drying coffee, too.

Ferguson said the early rounds of freeze dried vegetables have come from his own garden and orchard and been placed in Little Free Pantries. In fact, Ferguson has a Little Free Pantry outside his home at 500 E. Burlington Ave.

Ferguson said the Jefferson County Little Free Pantries organization plans to use monetary donations toward renting the freeze driers. Breadtopia provides five loaves of bread each week, at cost, to the Little Free Pantries group.

Ferguson said the collaboration between Fairfield Food Collective, Sustainable Living Coalition and Little Free Pantries is like a “safety net we’ve created for ourselves. It’s a more powerful way of taking care of each other.”

Saturley said that Fairfield Food Collective is exploring grant opportunities and hopes to have as many as 10 freeze dryers working at once, which could process 150 pounds of food per day.