First Food Product Rolls Out From Expanding Farmers’ Opportunities In Northwest Arkansas Program

FRED MILLER 

FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS

Aromatic steam rose off a cooking vat in the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station’s Arkansas Food Innovation Center earlier this month while rows of glass jars stood ready to receive a savory, tomato-based sauce. You won’t find this product on your supermarket shelves but at the farmers markets in northwest Arkansas.

Farmer’s Ratatouille is the first product to roll out of the Expanding Farmers’ Opportunities in Northwest Arkansas Program, a program designed to help cut down on food waste and create value-added products for farmers. In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

Expanding Farmers’ Opportunities in Northwest Arkansas is a partnership of the University of Arkansas System’s department of food science; Brightwater, A Center for the Study of Food; and The Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.

The experiment station is the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Brightwater is a division of Northwest Arkansas Community College.

The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers Market Promotion Program. The grant is provided by USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service through its Local Agriculture Market Program.

Renee Threlfall, an experiment station research scientist, said the program helps participating farmers learn to create shelf-stable, value-added food products from their surplus produce. Students at Brightwater develop recipes for foods that are produced at the experiment station’s Arkansas Food Innovation Center, a food manufacturing facility.

Chef Steve Jenkins, department chair at Brightwater and a partner in the Expanding Farmer’s Opportunities in Northwest Arkansas Program, said his students not only develop the recipes, but also team up with University of Arkansas food science students to produce the foods.

“They provide the expertise for farmers who want to turn their surplus produce into value-added products, but who are not trained as chefs or food processors,” Jenkins said.

The Farmer’s Ratatouille is made from tomatoes, squash, zucchini, eggplant and roasted red peppers produced by McGarrah Farms of Pea Ridge. Dennis McGarrah operates the farm at three locations in northwest Arkansas, where his family has been farming since 1824. He’s been farming for 60 years and sells his produce at farmers markets in Fayetteville, Bentonville and Rogers. He also sells produce at Rivercrest Farms, operated by his son, Dennis McGarrah Jr., near Fayetteville.

 Dennis McGarrah said he had a lot of “seconds” in squash and tomatoes and wanted to come up with a recipe for a shelf-stable product. “Seconds,” or “culls,” are vegetables that may have blemishes that consumers would reject at a farmers market.

“It’s perfectly fine produce that just doesn’t look good enough for the farmers markets,” McGarrah said. “Now I can turn them into products that can be sold year-round.”

Dennis McGarrah said he has worked with the Division of Agriculture on many projects over the years, so he reached out to Threlfall. She connected him with Jenkins, and his Brightwater students developed the recipe.

“I tried it out at home first and thought we had something,” Dennis McGarrah said. “This is the first time we’re scaling up to production level.” ∆

FRED MILLER: University of Arkansas