Their Business Is Helping To Grow Other Businesses
PHOTO: Genuine Local employee Clarissa MacDonald completes production of cocktail mixers for the Wood Stove Kitchen. Genuine Local and the Belknap Foodshed help local farmers and food producers build their own businesses. Dan Seufert Photo
by Dan Seufert
Weirs Times Correspondent
Gavin and Mary MacDonald have turned their love of family, neighbors, and food into a booming business that specializes in helping local farmers and food producers realize similar dreams.
The couple runs Genuine Local and its online home, The Belknap Foodshed. Genuine Local is their four-year-old commercial specialty food manufacturing facility that serves as a business incubator for food producers trying to build their businesses. At their 1,900-square-foot kitchen and storage building in Meredith, they offer production and packaging facilities and materials, as well as training and consulting services. They now serve 240 area small food businesses.
“And those are mostly one- or two-person businesses, so we support about 450 jobs,” said Mary MacDonald.
They help small and startup companies learn their businesses while following the government rules for food production. They also help local businesses by making their named specialty products, like a local restaurant’s barbecue sauce, in their kitchen “so the restaurant’s staff doesn’t have to worry about it.” They also make labels and bottle products, offering bulk prices on jars and labels.
“We help smaller food businesses scale up production, though for some we do all manufacturing so they can be doing sales and marketing and other important things,” Gavin MacDonald said. “We expect everyone to last as our customers for 3-5 years, so they get to the point where they outgrow us if that’s what they want, or they find their own levels of success through us.”
A few months ago, partly in response to COVID-19, they opened a partner company, The Belknap Foodshed, “which has a mission of connecting local food products with their destinations,” he said. The project’s online marketplace is its main component, though the MacDonalds hope to develop it beyond the site, which is at belknapfoodshed.localfoodmarketplace.com/Products.
The marketplace serves two dozen or so area food producers on the site, and there are more than 300 products available – everything from fresh produce to specialty cuts of locally raised lamb, beef, and goat to specialty condiments, honey, and maple syrup. They offer a few non-local items, like pasta and chip products that go with the shed’s primary food products.
“You can get pretty much anything you can get in a supermarket, with the exception of paper products and a few other things,” Gavin said.
The road to the MacDonalds’ business success started, Gavin said, when the couple’s kids bought him an outdoor cooker as a present. It continued when the family started making specialty barbecue sauces and trying to sell them. The big change came when the couple catered a friend’s wedding. They enjoyed the experience so much that they catered more weddings and began exploring business ideas for food-based careers.
Gavin, a former Sanbornton police officer, and Mary, who formerly worked in the field of environmental regulation, quit their “day jobs” in 2013 and began working catering jobs exclusively. They also began using a smaller shared food-preparation kitchen in Keene to manufacture their specialty sauces. But in 2015, the Keene kitchen closed, and the MacDonalds made a bolder move, opening Genuine Local in 2016.
“When the place in Keene closed, we had already been talking to our bank about building a smaller kitchen in Meredith for ourselves, so we leased the kitchen building and built it out,” Gavin said. “A lot of others who were also working at the Keene kitchen came with us and became our customers.”
Business grew steadily as the couple found more Lakes Region farmers who shared the same goal of getting their products to the public marketplace. Then, in March, the pandemic hit, and for about six weeks, business slowed as restaurants and farmer’s markets were closed, and business was cut in half. That prompted the couple to seek others dealing with the same issues. They connected with the Three River Farmers Alliance, a Seacoast-area farmers group that had developed a flourishing local food home-delivery business. The company sold food to customers in 1,000 Seacoast-area homes a week this summer.
The MacDonalds also found that food hubs on the Seacoast and elsewhere wanted to sell some of the Meredith-area products they offered, and, in starting the Belknap Food Shed marketplace, the couple agreed to sell some products from the Seacoast area. The couple bought a similar online platform and opened the shed.
“We had the same goals – cost-effective ways to get local food into the marketplace, while creating access to all of the products,” Gavin said. “They worked with us because we have shelves full of food, and now we’re also a producer on their platform, and now we make deliveries to the Seacoast twice a week.”
The shed marketplace opens Saturdays at 7 a.m. and orders can be placed until 12 p.m. the following Wednesday. They now offer curbside pickup of orders in Meredith, Laconia, and Loudon, and home delivery is available in Meredith and Laconia.
The couple is busier than ever now in both arms of the business, mostly because of the virus. In the fall, the kitchen books a month out normally. Now, there’s no room on the schedule before January for customers who haven’t booked it, even as the company expanded to seven employees.
Part of the recent surge in business has come from employees who have been laid off or had their hours cut because of the pandemic. “A lot of them need to try something different to make up for their lost hours,” he said.
Mary said many customers of the shed now seem to look forward to picking up their orders at the business, which is at the corner of Route 104 and Winona Road. They like seeing each other at the loading dock.
“There’s a socialization aspect to it,” she said. “People have been social distancing and wearing masks, but they’ve been staying home a lot. For many people it’s a fun outing.”
The MacDonalds see busier times ahead, so they are planning to expand. They have been working with state officials in planning what they hope will be their business’s new home in a section of the old Laconia State School property in Laconia. That development process has been slowed by the pandemic, as the property’s new Master Plan requires government approval and lawmakers are still going through the approval process, Gavin said.
Genuine Local and the Belknap Foodshed have helped Steve Zyck’s Mont Vernon business, the Wood Stove Kitchen, prosper greatly, said Zyck. The business produces bottles of all-natural cocktail and “mocktail” mixers. Now, the staff of Genuine Local makes the mixes, bottles and labels them in the Meredith kitchen.
“They’ve been incredible, we couldn’t have done it without them,” Zyck said. “We had been making it by ourselves and that was a nightmare. We can concentrate on marketing and sales now.”
