Processing Your Payment

Please do not leave this page until complete. This can take a few moments.

November 8, 2004

A piece of the pie | Mass. company launches specialty pie effort from Richmond facility

By Sean Donahue
Doug Roberts is not a chef. He's also not a vegetarian, vegan, hypoglycemic, diabetic or celiac (someone who's allergic to the gluten in wheat and other grains). Yet Roberts is behind a new venture designed to feed those groups and others who usually skip dessert because of food allergies or dietary restrictions.

As president of Foxboro, Mass.-based Naturally ME, Roberts recently completed work on a new processing facility in Richmond that in mid-November will introduce a line of frozen pies free of practically everything offensive to the food-sensitive set. Naturally ME pies, which will be sold under the Natural Feast name, are gluten free, dairy free and soy free, and contain no refined sugars, hydrogenated oils, animal products or artificial ingredients of any kind. They're kosher, too.

Even though Roberts doesn't count himself among his target customer groups, what attracted the entrepreneur ˆ— who's owned gas stations and a tire service center ˆ— was his impression of the size of that market. "When I started looking around the natural products and [dietary restriction] world, I realized the potential market share of people who could not have dessert without carefully examining the ingredients," says Roberts. "It's a combined group of about 100 million people just in the United States."

Products geared toward customers with food allergies also make up one of the fastest growing niches within the natural and organic products market. Sales of so-called food-allergy and intolerance products have nearly doubled since 1999, reaching about $1.8 billion in 2003, according to a report by New York-based Packaged Facts. Looking ahead, Packaged Facts predicts that food-allergy baked goods, flour and pasta will enjoy the fastest growth within the category, posting 25% annual sales increases through 2006.

To serve that market, Naturally ME plans to make about 1,000 pies a day during its first six months of operations; it hopes to distribute them to supermarkets and natural food stores across New England. At first, the company will employ about five people in Richmond, about 15 miles south of Augusta, but that number could increase to 30 within a year. (Two employees in Foxboro run the company's finances.) Roberts also plans to buy as much fruit and other raw materials as possible from Maine growers.

Like any specialty food manufacturer, though, Naturally ME's ability to realize these goals will depend on its ability to convince retailers and distributors to carry its products ˆ— and convince food-sensitive customers to buy them. And Roberts knows that process can be risky, considering that he bought the recipes and the Natural Feast brand name from a Massachusetts-based company that went bankrupt in 2003.

Pitching healthy pies
Roberts had followed the rise and fall of the Natural Feast Corp., the original manufacturer of Natural Feast pies. He went to high school with its founder, Alan Attridge, and worked for the company briefly when it began struggling a couple of years ago. Roberts says he saw that the problems had more to do with management issues than with the product or the market.

A year ago, Roberts and two partners agreed to buy the company's assets in a complex deal in which they paid $35,000 at closing and forgave the more than $51,000 they earlier had loaned the company; in addition, Naturally ME will pay a percentage of the company's annual net income to the bankruptcy trustee for the next five years.

Roberts tried finding a commercial bakery to manufacture Natural Feast pies, but quickly learned that contamination from gluten, dairy products and other typical pie ingredients in those facilities made the plan unworkable.

Realizing that the company would have to build its own facility, Roberts and his partners, all New Englanders, scouted locations in the region. Naturally ME eventually settled on Maine earlier this year because of its proximity to farmers who could supply fruit and raw materials, its workforce and what Roberts describes as its quality of life factors. The company then spent more than $300,000 to build an 8,000-square-foot manufacturing facility inside the Richmond Business and Manufacturing Center.

Creating a clean facility in an older building presented its own challenges, though. Among the renovations, Naturally ME had to install a special HVAC system that keeps the space pressurized, so when a door is opened the purified, filtered air inside the facility pushes out, rather than allowing unclean air to push its way inside.

As it built its facility, Naturally ME also worked on its business plan. The company hired Craig Bessermin, a chef who helped develop the original Natural Feast recipes and has worked in commercial bakeries, to oversee production of its apple, blueberry and chocolate mousse pies. Once it starts manufacturing this month, the company's goal is to place its products in 400-500 grocery stores and 500-600 natural food stores by May, at a retail price of just under $10.

Naturally ME also will sell pies directly to consumers through its website, as a way to tap into celiac and other food-sensitive online communities. "There's a very active, core group of customers seeking out products like this," says Felix Betro, Naturally ME's treasurer and chairman of the board. "That's going to be very helpful to us as we work to get into supermarkets and independent stores."

Word-of-mouth marketing and queries from customers can convince retailers to stock a product, says Caryn Knudsen, grocery manager at the Belfast Cooperative Store, which carries a range of gluten-free and other food-allergy related products. But what matters most is taste, and on that subject she's skeptical that Natural Feast's "free-of-everything" recipe can deliver. "They probably don't taste very good," she says. "Sorry, but most of [those products] don't."

But Shad Christopolous, the new products coordinator with Barrington, N.H.-based natural food distributor Associated Buyers, says his company used to carry Natural Feast pies, and that they were "awesome." This reporter could not taste a Natural Feast pie to judge for himself.

As consumer interest in food-allergy products grows, though, so will competition from both small manufacturers and large corporations. Last month, for example, Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods Inc. launched a gluten-free bakery to supply its chain of natural grocery stores. Yet Roberts and Betro say they haven't seen a pie that covers as wide an array of food allergies or sensitivities as Natural Feast's do. And high-profile moves such as Whole Foods' can help increase overall awareness of food allergies and the products available to deal with them, says Roberts.

Over the long term, Roberts is betting that market growth will allow Naturally ME to develop into a brand producing more than desserts, with plans for fair-trade coffee, pizza crusts and other products in the works. But he knows the first step is to get Natural Feast pies rolling out of the Richmond plant, so he can start convincing the market that his products live up to their promise. "We make the healthiest pie in the world," says Roberts. "I like walking into a store and asking people to prove to me that we don't."

Sign up for Enews

Most Recent

Most Recent

Comments

Order a PDF