Ugly Vegetable Certified

When Vanessa Walsten and Vanessa Williamson were paired up for a class project at Montana State University in 2016, they worked with a local farmer in Bozeman to find ways to use his excess produce that wasn’t aesthetically pleasing enough to sell to customers.

Walsten and Williamson brainstormed ways to transform the farmers’ ugly vegetables, like split carrots that appear deformed, into a sellable fermented product.

Throughout the next year, Walsten, who now has a degree in sustainable food systems and Williamson, who has a degree in business marketing, continued developing the company after the course ended and launched Farmented Foods in 2017, selling radish kimchi, dill sauerkraut and spicy carrots, which they learned to make while they were in school.

“We wanted to help this farmer solve a problem,” Williamson said. “He had all of these ugly excess crops that he couldn’t sell based on how they looked. Vanessa was super passionate about fermentation, and we used that for the basis of the products we made. We made three products that we still have to this day.”

Farmented Foods’ jarred products are all fermented with fresh, local vegetables and processed with spices and sit for a month in a 55-gallon oak barrel in Kalispell.

“It’s such an old method of preserving vegetables,” Walsten said. “It’s a good way to preserve your crops and it also has a lot of nutrition with probiotics and enzymes.”

Walsten and Williamson historically have also produced a Bloody Mary mix and a salsa, but they discontinued the products with tentative plans to bring them back again when tomatoes are fresh.

In addition to the jarred products, the Fixer Elixir is a versatile probiotic sipping tonic that can also be added to salad dressings and other dishes. Walsten describes it as vinegary tasting, like a pickle juice, and is sometimes consumed as a hangover cure.

The ferments can be used in a wide variety of recipes and the kimchi is commonly used in Asian dishes while Williamson also spreads it in the middle of a grilled cheese, coining the term “kim-cheese.” Walsten eats it with her eggs in the morning and she often eats the spicy carrots with crackers or straight out of the jar.

But aside from producing a tasty product, sustainability and education are the root of the company and they use slogans like #uglyvegetablecertifed and #savetheveggies to normalize produce that doesn’t look perfect but still has the same nutritional value.

“When we talked with our partner farmer at the time, he showed us cases of carrots that were deemed ugly that he wasn’t going to be able to sell,” Williamson said. “I was just a business marketing major and that really opened my eyes. It’s a delicious organic carrot, it just has two tails.”

Since launching Farmented Foods in 2017, the partners moved the business from Bozeman to Kalispell while Williamson works remotely from North Dakota, and they source vegetables from North Shore Farm in Somers, Two Bear Farm in Whitefish and other local farmers.

Farmented Foods is distributed from the Flathead Valley to southwest Montana and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Walsten recently set up a processing headquarters in Kalispell where she and her other business partner, Ethan Hamilton, also launched Le Petit Café in the Gateway Community Center.

Walsten uses the space to process the fermented products while she and Hamilton sell simple coffee items like espresso and drip coffee, sourced from Fieldheads Coffee Company in Bigfork.

After working in several coffee shops and cafes since high school, Hamilton describes himself as a coffee traditionalist while also introducing a bullet proof coffee to the menu, which includes coconut oil or butter and a collagen protein to serve as a meal supplement.

In addition to coffee, Le Petit offers nutritional mushroom tea, rotating bakery items from Red Poppy Gluten Free Bakery and Bonjour Bakery and house-made rotating organic soups. Farmented Foods products are also sold at the café.

For more information, visit www.farmented.com.