Vendors who share our passion

Chemist Derek Mortensen leads the Soquel Fermentation Project where he blends modern science with traditional coolship brewing. A coolship is a type of fermentation vessel — it’s a flat, open tub used for cooling and fermenting wort. At Derek’s brewery in the Santa Cruz mountains, wort chills in the cold winter air and soaks up the microflora of the redwoods. …

Over a century ago, Angelo Poncia immigrated from Italy to a remote California outpost and founded a dairy at what is now Stemple Creek Ranch. Now in its fourth-generation, the ranch is proudly run by Angelo’s great-grandson Loren who reinvented the family business with a vision for superior quality grass-fed meats. At over 1,000 acres, Stemple Creek Ranch is protected …

Founded by Stephen Williamson and JC Hanley in 2013, Forager Project is a family-owned producer specializing in small batch, plant-based foods. Crafted in Indio, California, Forager’s protein rich yogurts are made from ethically sourced cashew milk. Forager believes that the food we eat is as important as the air we breathe, and they hope to improve human and planet health …

Glenn Roberts came up with an ambitious plan in the late 1990’s: to make nearly extinct southern grains like Carolina Gold rice a viable Southern crop, and to grow them organically. Glenn hoped to re-create ingredients of the Antebellum Southern larder, including grits, cornmeal and rice that were all, once upon a time, milled fresh daily for the table. Available …

85% of the byproduct of beer is grain. This “spent” grain has as much protein as almonds and over three times the dietary fiber of oats. The creators of Regrained, Daniel Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz, have a solution for that.

If you measure a farm’s output by influence, there’s perhaps no more fertile land in our fair state than a 65-acre patch near Nicasio named Devil’s Gulch Ranch.

Dan and Joanne Lehrer moved to Sebastopol in 1999, just as one of the last of the town’s apple processors was closing up shop. “The most beautiful Gravenstein orchard in the world, the old Hallberg orchard along Highway 116 just north of town, was cut down that year,” they recall. “Imagine rows of majestic trees all felled in the same direction, …

Mr. Wong’s authentic Asian sauces have been enjoyed by lucky Bay Area residents for more than 50 years. First found only in Mr. Wong’s own East Bay restaurants, the hand-crafted line is now distributed  throughout Northern California. Bernice Wong grew up mixing and bottling her father’s sauces in his restaurants, knowing that, one day, she would be responsible for taking …

Christy Goldsby grew up in a family full of cooks, bakers, farmers, gardeners and happy eaters. “The kitchen was always a place of celebration, creativity, nourishment and joy,” she says. In 2012 she started Honey Mama’s in Portland, Ore., as a way to share her passion for healthy living and those celebrated family traditions. Her cacao-nectar bars are delicious desserts and …

Danya Mosgofian of San Francisco created the Sultry Gypsy Herb Company to make natural remedies that are alcohol-free but strong and efficacious.

Marin Kombucha founder Brian Igersheim studied biology and chemistry in college, then went to work in the food industry. This year, he launched his new venture to put his accumulated expertise to work making his own version of kombucha, the popular fermented fizzy tea drink. As the overview on the company’s website explains, kombucha is the result of “a playful ferment” – sugar turns …

“If you are having a bad day and want to make it better, have ice cream,” counsels Tara Esperanza. “If you are having a good day and you want to top it off, have ice cream.” We couldn’t agree more. Tara began making ice cream a decade ago in Santa Fe and set up shop in the East Bay a …

CaCoCo is to your childhood hot chocolate what a Ferrari is to your training bike. “We take chocolate back to the roots,” says founder Tony Portugal. His cofounder and “Chief Samurai Alchemist,” Liam Blackmon, has a background in anthropology and organic farming, and has dedicated the last seven years of his life to sustainable transformations of local and global food …

Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring founded an Internet company called Plaxo and sold it to Comcast in 2008. Then they opened Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco’s Mission district, and started making chocolate the way hardly anyone does any more, in a process beautifully explained on their website. “We took a very engineering, data-driven approach,” Ring explained to the San Francisco …

Anyone hailing from a colder clime marvels at the year-round bounty around here. Even in the middle of winter, our bins display a cornucopia of fresh, delicious produce, much of it from Full Belly Farms, a thirty year-old 350-acre certified organic farm in the Capay Valley, about 100 miles north of Sausalito. Their annual “Hoes Down” festival in October, an …

Truly Grains is a young Marin-based company on a mission to make grains great again. Truly Grains Pasta uses only ancient variety grains, also known as landrace, that have been around for hundreds of years, and haven’t been changed by modern breeding techniques. They work with small farms to grow our products organically, and avoid industrial agriculture. They mill their …

Evy Ballegeer started baking Little Belgians cookies in her Berkeley kitchen out of nostalgia. Speculoos are by far the most popular cookie in her native Belgium, flavored by blends of spices that vary from baker to baker. Her version combines nine spices that include cinnamon, cloves, pepper and cardamom. They taste great with coffee, tea, milk, or hot chocolate, making …

The Yes Bar came about when a Los Angeles mother got tired of saying “no” to things her kids wanted to eat. Abigail Wald created the Yes Bar to give them a grain-free treat made entirely of real foods and entirely free of binders, fillers or preservatives. Over 20 real foods go into each and every Yes Bar. Every single bite is a …

Seventy-five million Koreans can’t be wrong. Now we have Ellen White and Ellen’s Kimchi to show us why their staple food makes good eating for everyone. A traditional food that remains a part of everyday modern life in Korea, kimchi consists of raw vegetables that naturally ferment in purees of fruits, garlic, ginger and Korean spices. Kimchi is a living …

There’s granola, and then there’s Nana Joes. It’s made in San Francisco by hand in a gluten-free kitchen, full of locally-sourced fruits and nuts, and sweetened only by maple syrup from an artisan producer on the East Coast. Former pastry chef Michelle Pusateri named it after her grandparents (one Nana, two Joes). “I was making my own granola and giving …