Helping Farmers & Reducing Waste, One Bloody Mary at a Time, with Back Pocket Provisions

Full Transcript:

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Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies

[00:00:00] Will Gray: I know that that bloody Marys aren't the entire answer. But I do think that if we can start to mobilize the artisan food space and, and the sort of good food economy and look at some ways to stop farmers and more broadly suppliers as a cost to be minimized and rather as a, a partner to be accounted for if we want to change.

[00:00:21] Will Gray: The way the success looks, we probably need to change the way that we compare those numbers.

[00:00:29] Georgiana Dearing: Welcome to the Virginia Foodie Podcast, where we lift a lid on the craft food industry and tell the stories behind the good food, good people, and good brands that you know and love. If you've ever come across a yummy food brand and wondered how did they do that? How did they turn that recipe into a successful business?

[00:00:49] Georgiana Dearing: Then we've got some stories for you.

[00:00:55] Georgiana Dearing: Hello and welcome to episode 20 of the Virginia Foodie. Thank you for being here today. I'm talking with Will Gray from back Pocket provisions. A maker of bloody Mary mixes in Richmond. Will and his team are on a mission to make life more delicious, healthy, honest, and fun by helping small farms. I met Will a few years ago at a show, and I've been hoping to talk to him about building a Virginia based business from local tomatoes.

[00:01:26] Georgiana Dearing: After all, Virginia Rake's 10th in the nation for tomato farming, producing just half of what, number nine, North Carolina contributes to the tomato economy. Back pocket also calls their company a social enterprise, and in today's conversation will shares how their intentional approach to collaboration impacts not just their tomato supply, but their relationships with farmers and their plans for future growth.

[00:01:54] Georgiana Dearing: Through their line of specialty Bloody Mary Mixes, wills found a product that supports his company's pursuit of a new food system that works better for everyone. And that's a brand message you can hear loud and clear.

[00:02:14] Georgiana Dearing: So I'm with Will Gray from Back Pocket Provisions. Hi Will, thanks for coming to the 

[00:02:19] Will Gray: podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be. 

[00:02:23] Georgiana Dearing: Well, uh, first thing, can you explain a little bit about your business to our listening? 

[00:02:28] Will Gray: Yeah, of course. So I'm the founder of Back Pocket Provisions. We're here in Richmond, Virginia, and we're a for-profit social enterprise with a mission of making life more delicious, healthy, honest, and fun by helping small farmers succeed.

[00:02:45] Will Gray: And one of the ways that we do that, which is I think what we're gonna talk about today, is by turning locally grown fruits and vegetables into a line of award-winning Be Bloody Mary Mix. 

[00:02:55] Georgiana Dearing: Well, I definitely know you for your Bloody Mary mix. I think you gave me a sample at a real local R V A event and I was very, very pleased to have that.

[00:03:04] Georgiana Dearing: It was great. Good. That's what we're going for. I have tons of questions for you, but my first thing is like lot of crap bands start as kind of a side gig. Where are you on your journey as a food manufacturer? How many employees do you have and that kind of thing. How big is back pocket right now? 

[00:03:22] Will Gray: We started as a, as a side gig.

[00:03:25] Will Gray: I am full-time. I made the leap in 2019 after we, we first kicked off in the summer harvest of 2015. I think I am still the only full-time staff. . Trey manages our outfit in Charlottesville. He works about halftime doing everything from farmer's markets to bookkeeping, and we have four or five, depending on the time of year, other folks that work at events and in-store demos back when that was a thing.

[00:03:56] Will Gray: Right now we are in the the sort of transition time. Even if this wasn't the tail end of a, of a pandemic, this is the sort of transitional moment as we start to staff back up ahead of mm-hmm. , the big, everyone wants to hang out outdoors season. 

[00:04:11] Georgiana Dearing: Oh yeah. So I was gonna ask you, how, how did the pandemic impact your business?

[00:04:15] Georgiana Dearing: I mean, 2019. You probably didn't know what a rocky time you were heading into when you said, I think I'm gonna do this full-time . 

[00:04:23] Will Gray: Thank goodness I don't have healthcare or any sort of a Yeah, exactly. . No, but honestly, with so much luck and gratitude, we're doing very well, and we're very busy operationally.

[00:04:35] Will Gray: The core of our business is based around personal relationships with small farmers and producers near us. Mm-hmm. , which means that. There's no part of a global pandemic that makes me wanna say, I told you so. , like we, we didn't like, we didn't have to learn a really hard lesson about how fragile global supply chains can be.

[00:04:56] Will Gray: We were already trying to do something a little bit different, so we didn't have to do quite as mu, we still had to do the sort of adaptations and pivots to match our customers, but our day in day out was a little bit more shielded from this than many of our colleagues in the space. Feel very lucky for that to have been the case.

[00:05:15] Will Gray: So tell 

[00:05:15] Georgiana Dearing: me a little bit more about your relationships with farmers. I see on your site that you turn delicious, but ugly fruits and vegetables. Tell me a little bit more what you mean about 

[00:05:26] Will Gray: that. The goal in designing products is to create new opportunity for. small scale farms, and not just more opportunity, although that that's wonderful and important, but we were trying to find new things that were accessible to the smallest farms and still relevant to sort of mid-scale agriculture.

[00:05:47] Will Gray: Mm-hmm. . And so one way that we found we could do that is by building a market for seconds. Seconds are like fruits and vegetables that are the wrong size and shape. Maybe for a farmer's market shopper or maybe for a grocery store buyer. But for a bloody Mary maker that's like secret ingredient . And honestly, one of the funny things that we've learned is that way more often than I expected, the imperfection.

[00:06:15] Will Gray: This is a podcast, so the quote imperfection, with air quotes. The thing that's wrong with the tomato is that it's too ripe, like because it's perfectly ready to eat today. It can't wait on the shelf. Oh. Where you pick it up at the local market, it won't travel well. Right. And so it's been kind of funny.

[00:06:34] Will Gray: Like for us, that's our most important speck when we're talking to farmers is it's like send the stuff that's ready right now. And we've been able to make little sort of operational decisions to try to support that. So folks can, a small farmer can take their stuff to. They can sell through everything they're gonna sell on a Saturday and know that on Monday, everything that's left, they're gonna ship to us.

[00:06:59] Will Gray: Or for a wholesale grower selling to a grocery store, they know that they're gonna send their wholesale route on Thursday. They don't have another truck until Monday. And so everything in the middle that they might not have a home for, we want it. Wow. That 

[00:07:13] Georgiana Dearing: seems like a complex network. Is it difficult to source that way?

[00:07:18] Georgiana Dearing: Yes, , 

[00:07:20] Will Gray: yes, absolutely. I sometimes joke that it is either the really good idea or the really stupid idea in the center of back pocket provisions. I'm a proud, like operations nerd. Mm-hmm. , and for me, that's what makes it fun. It is logistically complicated. . It is not the easiest solution, but I think because of that, we're able to do things a little bit differently and create a planning cycle that brings a lot of value to us.

[00:07:47] Will Gray: Works really well for our farmers. Sets us apart on the shelf. Mm-hmm. and when everything goes perfectly, like the customer is never the wiser. It is our mission and our decision to source seasonally. That's our problem to solve. Mm-hmm. . And so in a perfect world, everything still runs smooth. The customer just orders and is none the wiser.

[00:08:10] Will Gray: Of course it never goes perfectly. And I do have to admit I've absolutely tried, especially this time of year. This is the toughest time when we are the furthest from harvest, but it's warm outside and people are starting to be like, I do want a bloody. You know, I might gently push you towards a different thing.

[00:08:26] Will Gray: I'll be like, yeah, I know that you, you want the bloody Bangkok. Like, I, I see that. But like, I think your customers are really, really gonna enjoy the bloody ba Oh, . It's a harder way of building a supply chain. Yeah. But it's a way of building a supply chain that serves all of the partners and not just those at the end.

[00:08:43] Georgiana Dearing: Yeah, so you kind of touched on, on something there, which was sourcing, like if you're trying to sell year round, like how far away are you drawing these tomatoes and how are you gonna scale this business? 

[00:08:57] Will Gray: Yeah, that is a very, very good question. Suffice to say, I won't bore you with the long version because that, that would require quite a few glasses of wine to get through.

[00:09:05] Will Gray: I think . So the question of, of our sourcing radius, we, so we started as being. Like we said, Virginia grown when the reality was it was, I mean it was like 30 miles or less because it was farmers that we were friends with and we didn't that much. We grew into across Virginia. Virginia has excellent biodiversity of grow zones, so we can start in the sort of warmer sandier, climbs east and then sort of roll with the season all the way up into the mountains.

[00:09:34] Will Gray: Mm-hmm. and get pretty long tomato season. Mm-hmm. and we've just started. Last year it was 2020, right? Mm-hmm. , I still can't get the dates right. We just started piloting through a group of local food hubs, like local food aggregators called the Eastern Food Hub Coalition, and we just started dipping a toe into North and South Carolina to do some like Carolina grown collaborations.

[00:09:59] Will Gray: Mm-hmm. . And so we're hoping that's an exciting sort of long-term development. 

[00:10:04] Georgiana Dearing: So we're talking in May and you're talking about the season not being ready yet for Virginia Tomatoes. So will that, will that Carolina connection extend you a little bit earlier in the year to getting tomatoes? 

[00:10:16] Will Gray: Yeah, so the sort of way that the cycle works to some extent is we start on our end and we say, these are our strategic goals, or these are our sales targets for the year, and then now it's the off season we go.

[00:10:31] Will Gray: To our farmer network and say, what do you have? What would you need to be able to grow this? And we put together a production plan to make sure that our goals and their goals are supporting each other. 

[00:10:43] Georgiana Dearing: Yeah. Cuz they gotta put it in the ground. Right. 

[00:10:46] Will Gray: Exactly. We're done with that. That was three months ago because that's when their cycle is, is turning.

[00:10:53] Will Gray: This time of year, it's like we look at the processing end and say, okay, are there enough days? Are there enough hours in this timeframe to like juice and kettle all of those tomatoes into something and then we go back? To our financials and say, where the heck are we gonna find enough money to buy all these tomatoes that we've committed to

[00:11:14] Will Gray: So that's the cycle. And so a partner like we're working with Grow Food Carolina in Charleston, shout out Grow food. They might be able to get us started in June. Mm-hmm. . Whereas maybe for us, we're normally looking for mid. In Virginia not to just have the first tomatoes, but for there to be enough tomatoes that the growers have extra because we're basically in the market for the extra tomatoes.

[00:11:40] Georgiana Dearing: Okay, so no one's really planting a field for you. ? No, 

[00:11:44] Will Gray: certainly not a field. We do production plan with folks, so we have particularly our, our smaller growers. Mm-hmm. , we've made a commitment to them to purchase in accordance with how they want to grow. It's often x pounds a week, and we have folks that really want to engage differently.

[00:12:00] Will Gray: So for some people the value is that they can go to market, sell everything that they can possibly sell, and then. Send us a text message that says like, I have 47 pounds of tomatoes. Do you want them? Yeah. And then for some folks, the value is being able to say, we're gonna send 250 pounds every Tuesday.

[00:12:22] Will Gray: Right? And then for mid-scale growers, it's often like, we wanna send a pallet. That's the only thing that it's worth it for us to send. Let us know if you want a pallet. And so we try to meet each of those sort of growing groups where they. And try to find a way to make that plug into our operations. 

[00:12:41] Georgiana Dearing: I was starting to go, if you're building a business based on just the leftovers, th that's gonna be really hard to scale.

[00:12:47] Georgiana Dearing: But one thing you did say is a benefit is if someone is planning a percentage of yield. Right, right. They know that the less pretty ones can go into that percentage, and so you're actually helping them get more out of that crop than they would have because they've got stuff that wouldn't sell or go at less cost price or something.

[00:13:10] Georgiana Dearing: I'm starting to venture into farming things that I don't know about. So , 

[00:13:15] Will Gray: that's it. The thought on our end is farming is such a, is such an incredibly risky business. For something that's so important and one of the roles of manufacturing should be to try to mitigate that risk. Mm-hmm. . So the goal is that like, We work with Shine Farms here in Richmond, for example.

[00:13:34] Will Gray: Mm-hmm. , that's a, a very small outfit. And as they are trying to grow and maybe move from not just on-farm and start to move into wholesale, it's a really big jump. And so this way they can mitigate some of that risk for them. Mm-hmm. because they know that they've got us, they know that either, either that we're gonna buy consistently and on time in the same.

[00:13:54] Will Gray: Or that we can be flexible and they can say, Hey, we got a great opportunity. We have nothing for you. But next week we're gonna have. 

[00:14:02] Georgiana Dearing: You know, it's funny, I've seen some of these deals being made in farmer's markets, but at the chef level where a chef is looking for particular kinds of ingredients and I, I just remember particularly seeing like herbs and then shishito peppers, and it's like, I'll give you what I have now.

[00:14:18] Georgiana Dearing: And they're like, okay, so next season can you talk about how much you can put in for me? You know? And. , this is that next step, which is manufacturing, saying, okay, I have this need. Can you provide this now? And as that relationship builds, you can start figuring out the comfort level of your producer.

[00:14:38] Will Gray: That's exactly right. That's my background. I worked in food service until I came to this space, and for me, that was often the most fun part. You get that creative outlet of. What's the best thing we can do with the, with the ingredients that we have available? Mm-hmm. , one of the reasons why we went into Bloody Mary Mix is that there is often a very healthy market.

[00:14:58] Will Gray: For seconds of what are often called paste tomatoes. Tomatoes with a very low moisture content. Mm-hmm. chefs love them because they cook down into sauces really well and really well, often means quickly like they don't have a lot of water. But where, where there wasn't a lot of market for seconds is like big ugly heirloom tomatoes, like big honking Cherokee purple with all the cre.

[00:15:23] Will Gray: Right. . Which are, which are beautiful. And they're like the darling of a farmer's market when they're nice. But when they're not nice, they're like notoriously hard to sell. They rupture, they get frost damage. They're very finicky. They often weren't what the chefs wanted to work with because they have so much water in them that it takes a really long time to cook them out.

[00:15:44] Will Gray: Mm-hmm. . And so we came at it from the, we wanna be in the tomato water business, . Uh, we can hopefully snap. The stuff that doesn't have a home, rather than competing with awesome chefs that are already doing their part to make the local food system go. 

[00:16:00] Georgiana Dearing: Yeah, and there's heirloom, they're full of flavor, so, you know, I can see where your, your mixes get a really distinctive flavor.

[00:16:09] Georgiana Dearing: Definitely not the, uh, clamato of my grandfather's era. We mentioned like chefs. Where are you selling now? I know that you're in retail and you do some direct to consumer. Where are you selling this mix? When you talk about planning to get the money for these tomatoes, where are you selling? 

[00:16:31] Will Gray: It is a healthy mix of everything.

[00:16:34] Will Gray: Let's say particularly here in in Virginia, particularly for the next couple of years following Coronavirus. Mm-hmm. , because so much market has shifted. So many customers shifted from food service to retail or just trying new things. Mm-hmm. work with about 150 wholesale locations, mostly independent.

[00:16:55] Will Gray: That's everything from tasting rooms where they're making cocktails with our stuff. Grocery stores where we're being sold as a pantry item. Farm stands where folks are selling us tomatoes, and then they're bringing in our bloody Marys back to the farm stand. There's all sorts baked into there. and we love our restaurant and bar business.

[00:17:15] Will Gray: It is quiet right now. I'm sure it'll come sort of roaring back soon enough. Mm-hmm. and then Beyond Wholesale? Yeah. We do four full-time farmers markets in Richmond and in Charlottesville. And we offer direct shipping to your home Via our website. Mm-hmm. or your business? Via Fair. 

[00:17:34] Georgiana Dearing: I was just gonna ask, are you using something like Fair to reach those other independent grocer gift retail?

[00:17:42] Will Gray: Yes, we just started in March. We've been very happy so far. And dear listener, if you're an independent retailer, check us out, . We can give you a special link. We'll give you the hookup. That sounds 

[00:17:52] Georgiana Dearing: good. I'm gonna circle back to another thing you said in your introduction, because I want a bit of an explanation, although I think the explanation is embedded in what you talked about, your relationships with farmers, but you said, we are a social enterprise, and tell me what that means to you as the brand owner.

[00:18:15] Will Gray: I love that question. So when I say that we are a social enterprise, I mean that at least in our case, we're a for-profit, privately held business entity. We advance our goals through through sales and through revenue, but rather than optimizing for shareholder return or optimizing for net profit, which is the sort of traditional purpose of a corpor.

[00:18:38] Will Gray: We optimize for our mission, and so for us, we have a very peculiar business model. Some very smart people would say a broken business model in which we wanna keep our costs, like our costs of good sold. . We are not trying to push that down as low as possible. We're in fact kind of trying to pick that up, like that's our mission.

[00:18:59] Will Gray: We serve the farmers that make up our costs, so we are using the, the tool or like the structure of for-profit business, but rather than just pointing it at. Net profit. We're trying to point it at a little bit more of a holistic group of stakeholders, the farmers that, that make this all happen. Our staff and our team and our partnerships and enough profit to keep growing and keep expanding that impact.

[00:19:28] Georgiana Dearing: Oh my goodness. You're the second person that I've interviewed where we've talked about this, and I'm gonna venture onto thin ice myself on this one, but listen for the interview with Sarah Delavan. She's a good food, C F O, and she talked about cost of good sold. And we talked about the fact that like the brands that I work with, I think sometimes are trying to artificially keep their pricing down a bit.

[00:19:54] Georgiana Dearing: It makes sourcing difficult when really if you're trying to change a food system and make sort of equitable pay all the way across the board. You know, the farmers and, and other producers need to be getting more , you know, you know, I mean there's like two ends of the, of the food system here. We certainly have seen in the pandemic the issues with the service industry being sort of not in any kind of, uh, of a safety net.

[00:20:26] Georgiana Dearing: And then I think farming is on that, on that same end. It's really difficult to. Earning a really healthy wage in farming. 

[00:20:34] Will Gray: Absolutely. And it is an extremely complex problem that, yeah, I would be thrilled to be able to, to spend a life's work trying to unpack. I know that that bloody Marys aren't the entire answer.

[00:20:47] Will Gray: But I do think that if we can start to mobilize the artisan food space and, and the sort of good food economy and look at some ways to stop farmers and more broadly suppliers as a cost to be minimized and rather as a, a partner to be accounted for. If we want to change the way that success looks, we probably need to change the way that we compare those numbers.

[00:21:10] Georgiana Dearing: Oh my goodness. Okay, so I'm inspired now. I think you're going to hear from me a, a whole series on really the economy of the Good Food network. I think it's important and I don't know enough, so I think I'm going to use this to, to educate myself. I think I need to do that, but yeah, love 

[00:21:27] Will Gray: it. We'll have a couple Bloody Mary's then.

[00:21:29] Will Gray: Wax, progressive economics. That sounds great. Yeah. , 

[00:21:33] Georgiana Dearing: I think. Well, yeah, that does sound really great. And now, now I'm trying to get back to being serious podcast business here, . Um, you mentioned tasting rooms. I thought that was really interesting because we've had quite a boon of distilleries in Virginia, was at a new one just a few weeks ago and, Said that there wasn't enough to put in my, my tasting

[00:21:56] Georgiana Dearing: So it's like they need to be their early on their early days in their a, b, C license. And so I imagine that there's gonna be some really interesting cocktail opportunities coming through that. I guess that was just a bit of a segue, but you know, you talked about being on the cusp of coming out of the pandemic and is, I don't know if this is too early for me to ask this question, but are there things that you started to do and learned to do in the pandemic that you hoped to carry forward?

[00:22:27] Georgiana Dearing: Like did, were you accelerated into something that, that you think is gonna really enhance what you're doing with back pocket? , 

[00:22:35] Will Gray: there are like sales and production pieces of that. Mm-hmm. . But I think the, for me, I learned a whole lot about management. During pandemic, it was certainly the most, being an entrepreneur and particularly a solo entrepreneur can be really, really isolating anyway in the best of times.

[00:22:54] Will Gray: Mm-hmm. , and I think I came out of the pandemic with a, a new appreciation, perhaps this will sound obvious to everyone, but a new appreciation for how critical teaming is. Not just because like you need the capacity to get all the work done, but because we. Other people and other ideas and other perspectives to carry us through the day, and also how hard that is.

[00:23:20] Will Gray: Mm-hmm. , how being, managing, again, I speak only to my own experience, but trying to lead a values-based business is hard because. I recognize that I am, in many ways, I am forcing my values on people. I am saying that it is non-negotiable that people care about a thing that I am very passionate about. And I think I learned a lot about Amid trying to make mission-based cocktail mixes, , you know, black Lives Matter protests and such a summer of violence and trauma and disease.

[00:23:50] Will Gray: It was, it was a very humbling experience, I think, to see. Far I personally need to come as a, as a manager to be a part of this better food economy in the future. As, as much as I look forward to talking about cost of goods sold, it will, it'll take a lot more than Excel spreadsheets. I got a healthy dose of that this last year.

[00:24:12] Will Gray: Oh yeah. Whether or not any of us 

[00:24:13] Georgiana Dearing: were ready for it. Yeah, I like that. It's gonna take more than Excel sheets. Yeah. That's a good . Yeah. Very good. Well, I need to know what's on the horizon. Like have you thought about what's next? Have everyone's been in survival mode? But you certainly are forward looking.

[00:24:32] Georgiana Dearing: What's next for you? 

[00:24:34] Will Gray: The farmers haven't spring has come. It's the growing season. Waits, waits on no one. So to some extent I am thrilled by that, that the. Like we have, we need to turn 48,000 pounds of tomatoes into 45,000 bottles of Bloody Mary mix, like one, one way or the other. That's next. Mm-hmm. that starts in, in earnest in the coming months, we're gonna keep working on growing our, our wholesale footprint here in Virginia and beyond, and we're gonna keep trying to, to be good partners and be good listeners and find new ways to help small farms build the businesses they need in order to keep creating.

[00:25:14] Will Gray: Fresh, wonderful ingredients that we all need. Well, I 

[00:25:17] Georgiana Dearing: just love your vision. I love that you've really taken this like stand in the ground and I don't think that you're necessarily forcing your values as much as owning them. , which is really good brand management, quite frankly. It's like, you know, , you kind of know who you are and that is fine.

[00:25:33] Georgiana Dearing: That's gonna position you right in that space you wanna be in, in the market, and I think like-minded people will find you and to help them. Can you tell people where they can find you? 

[00:25:45] Will Gray: Yeah, of course. Find us on social media. We're on on Instagram and on Facebook at back pocket provisions. Find us online from your.

[00:25:55] Will Gray: Computer or mobile device at www.backpocketprovisions.com. We don't have a physical address, but check us out at Farmer's Markets in Charlottesville and in Richmond. 

[00:26:08] Georgiana Dearing: What are they? Can you name '

[00:26:09] Will Gray: em? In Richmond, we're at the south of the James Farmer's Market, which is now a Thursday evening market. And you'll also find, find us that the brand, the brand new rebranded big RBA market, which is the Saturday market in Bryan.

[00:26:24] Will Gray: Okay. Yeah, right. Speaking of brand management, there's all sorts of stuff going on. and in Charlottesville, the Charlottesville city market will return to a face-to-face market this Saturday. We will be there. We'll be there all season. So come, come find us, and then we'll also be at the Mead Park. Farmer's Market on Wednesdays.

[00:26:43] Georgiana Dearing: Oh, that's great. Thank you for that. And then all of those independent grocers can find you on fair? Is that 

[00:26:48] Will Gray: right? Yep. Find us on fair. And if you're just thirsty for a bloody, but maybe not looking for case purchasing, we also have a list of all the restaurants and retailers near you where you can find our stuff.

[00:26:59] Georgiana Dearing: Oh, that's great. Well, thank you. I mean, I think I could talk to you for another day or two, but we have to end somewhere. So thank you for telling your story and sharing your vision for your company. I really enjoyed it. Of 

[00:27:12] Will Gray: course. Thank you for the space and for the time. 

[00:27:15] Georgiana Dearing: Thanks for listening, and if you wanna learn more about how to grow your own food brand, then click on Grow My brand@vafoodie.com.

[00:27:24] Georgiana Dearing: If you're a lover of local food, then be sure to follow us. We are at VA Foodie on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Join the conversation and tell us about your adventures with good food, good people, and good brands.