Minnesota's Sno-Pac Foods becoming a well-loved brand

Inside, the beans are cut, blanched, and flash frozen by spending just a few minutes at temperatures around 15 to 20 degrees below zero. My favorite part of the process was watching a video game-like machine perform quality control. As the beans raced along a conveyor belt, the machine scanned their shape and color to distinguish properly cut, unblemished beans from undesirable ones or weeds. When it identified a foreign object, the machine deployed a puff of air to shoot it out of the batch—like playing Space Invaders with button weeds subbing for alien ships. Next, the beans were scanned by a metal detector and then hauled to a nearby packaging facility, where they are sealed in plastic bags. Gengler estimates that Sno-Pac packs more than 10 million pounds of produce a year.

Sno-Pac controls just a few percent of the frozen organics market, overshadowed by the dominant player, Cascadian Farms, which has been a subsidiary of General Mills since 1999. Still, Sno-Pac has a strong presence on local co-op shelves and a loyal following. "It's the most famous and well-loved of the frozen brands I have," says Paul Barnum, who buys Sno-Pac for the Seward Co-Op. "Sno-Pac is the king."

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More About

• Pete Gengler
• Paul Barnum
• Nate Oerter
• Fruits and Vegetables
• Foods

Barnum says local, sustainable foods have increasingly become more important to shoppers than organic certification, and he points out that several of the other frozen organic brands his co-op carries import vegetables grown all over the world. The shipping requirements of that business model start to look a lot like that of large, conventional agricultural operations that co-ops eschew. Both in terms of food miles and bolstering local economies, Barnum says, it doesn't make any sense to buy Chinese-grown edamame when Sno-Pac offers a local product. Plus, "I think [Sno-Pac's] is the best tasting," he says. Nate Oerter, frozen-food buyer for the Wedge, agrees: "Their quality is superior to Cascadian Farms, and their price is better," he says.