LocalSprout Hosts Mid-Week Market to Connect Chefs, Foodies to Local Growers

Last Wednesday, I visited the Mid-Week Market, San Antonio's first indoor farmers market, located at LocalSprout Food Hub at 503 Chestnut Street.

The Hub, which sells sustainably-grown produce, meats, dairy and more, opens its doors to the public from 3 to 7 p.m. every Wednesday. I was visiting for the first time.

LocalSprout is located in the core of downtown San Antonio, a neighborhood where wholesale and shipping facilities are interspersed with houses and businesses. As I pulled up to the rear entrance to park, I could hear a Roy Orbison song playing inside the two open doors. Outside and over the fence, a group of men were sitting in a circle of lawn chairs in their backyard, drinking beer and playing cards.

The first thing I saw when I walked in was a front desk where a friendly young woman greeted me. A banner advertising Alamo Beer Co.'s locally-crafted brew hung on the wall. To the left, I glimpsed the hub's refrigerator of locally-raised meats, a wall decorated in oak panels bearing the words, "Eat Local," and two glass doors leading into a chilled room of produce.

LocalSprout is an incubator spot for people to come in and figure out their product – how to make it, develop a label or brand, market it and sell it to customers and business owners. The Mid-Week Market gives chefs a place to taste local wholesale and retail foods and directly purchase them, but it's open to everyone.

ModSnap Radio provided music for Wednesday's Mid-Week Market.

The warehouse is committed to connecting eaters with as much sustainable food as possible, both by growing food hydroponically on site and by providing the space for food and beverage companies to make artisan products to distribute across the country.

I soon found Stephen Paprocki, director of the Chef Cooperatives, whom I'd talked to multiple times before about local food. Stephen is very friendly and vocal, not only about his own business, Texas Black Gold Garlic, but the entrepreneurs who've set up shop at LocalSprout to see their own visions come to fruition.

One of those entrepreneurs is San Antonio native James Mireles, a coffee roaster and brewer who founded Pulp Coffee at LocalSprout in December of 2015 after working for 20 years in the coffee industry in California and Texas.

Pulp Coffee is one of about eight coffee roasters currently operating in San Antonio. Specifically, it's a premium, private-label coffee roasting company that custom blends and roasts for other companies.

Once the owner of another private label coffee company, Mireles gave me a tour of the room at the back of the building, which sports a coffee bar, coffee roaster and bags of imported coffee beans. And friends. Lots of friends, some of them working as baristas or sipping coffee at the bar. All have one thing in common: An interest in really good coffee and tea.

Every week, the roasters open to the public for four hours at the Market, during which they've hosted visitors from chef schools to groups from the San Antonio YMCA, he said.

Mireles explained how he'd like to supply ultra-premium roast coffee to third-wave coffee shops – those stores offering specialty rather than commodity coffee.

The company currently sells to retail stores, and customers can buy Pulp Coffee on the roaster's website, he explained.

"My vision is of a shared concept where manufacturers can pull together, under one roof, in a warehouse," he said. "In the City of San Antonio, the next phase is retail, and we would like to help be the designers of the warehouse for these retail operations."

Following this business model has enabled Mireles to pay about half the price of what a typical brick and mortar space would cost to set up and roast coffee. Here, guests can visit and taste all the different blends that Pulp Coffee makes right on site.

"Theoretically, coffee is a fruit, and taste is subjective," he said. "When we bring people for tastings, we brew four distinctive, different coffees – usually including two coffees from Ethiopia. The view at Pulp means it's about you."

After our conversation, I felt the energy boost I typically enjoy from a cup of coffee and decided to peruse the market. I ran into Bryan Pape, one of the partners in Truckin' Tomato, the first vendor to move into LocalSprout and the sponsor of the Mid-Week Market.

Bryan Pape shows off some of the fresh greens grown by Johnson's Backyard Garden in Austin, one of the food purveyors working with Truckin' Tomato to supply produce to the Mid-Week Market. 

The company works with farmers and food purveyors at small to mid-sized farms across Texas to distribute sustainable and organic fruits, veggies and meats to San Antonio restaurants.

Pape explained how he defines "local" as food sourced within a 300-mile radius of Austin and San Antonio.

Truckin' Tomato's business has evolved from a portable farmers market that drove to food deserts, or areas of town lacking in fresh food, to a Community Supported Agriculture venture selling boxes of food. Last December, it became a wholesale operation, and Pape has since helped organize underground dinners at restaurants around San Antonio.

Pape said they'll give the featured restaurant a list of available products so the chef can write his or her own menu around it.

"It's a great way to showcase the chef and the rest of the staff, and I can bring in a new chef as a client," he said. "There is a huge list of foodies who want in on this. We've gotten a flood of emails. People are willing to pay $120 to attend these dinners."

Pape said they always work with Pulp Coffee and most recently featured chef John Rust from the local restaurant, Lüke, at one of the dinners.

I paused to consider this. While I really like healthy, delicious food and all the extra flavor it contains when it's grown by local farmers, I wouldn't call myself a foodie. With no current full-time job, I tend to restrict my food expenses to things I can buy at the grocery store and an occasional farmers market. I buy local food when I can, but only what I can afford.

However, Pape makes the dinner sound so delicious that I ask him to send me the information about the next one.

Next, Stephen and I talked to Mitch Hagney, the owner of LocalSprout.

Hagney has taken growing green to the next level and is responsible for the hydroponic greens grown here. He walked us through the hydroponic room, which is actually a 40-foot-long shipping container equipped with a vertical growing system that runs on solar power. It's a closed loop system where plants can be produced without any soil.

"For about three-and-a-half years, I've sold crops grown in this container," he said. "I use about 1 percent of the water that other farms use. I'm currently working on creating a good supply chain for local businesses."

Outside, we walked along the side of the building overlooking Chestnut Street. I remember driving by here a year ago and seeing a couple bushes and a green lawn, but Hagney has transformed it into a small garden filled with amaranth. Both the amaranth grain and the leaves, roots and stems can be eaten and are currently sold at the Pearl Farmers Market every Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

With all these fresh ideas to chew on, I glanced around the floor at some of the other market vendors. I hadn't had a chance to talk to the fermentation specialists at Madge's Food Co., the vendors from Deep River Specialty Foods, the experts at Southern Grit Flavor, Lil' Red's Boiled Peanuts, Cocina Heritage or the pet nutrition specialist at Pet Wants, but I also wanted to get a better understanding of the kind of space this is.

What's the big idea behind LocalSprout, I wondered? How does it fit into the modern food landscape, and more importantly, how can it change our attitudes about agriculture so that we're not only working harder to grow food, but working smarter?

One key farm practice used here is there are no pesticides and no fertilizer runoff. That's a noble goal for 2017, a year in which most food grown within the corn and soybean-based diet was raised using pesticides and herbicides.

On most large-scale farms, amaranth is known as pigweed – a plant that has developed resistance to glyphosate, the traditional herbicide treatment. While a different species of amaranth grows in farmers' fields, both types are apparently very nutritious, and it's nice to see that someone has turned what's been considered a weed into a nutritious food valued by ancient cultures around the world. Part of the charm of the urban food revival is that it takes food that people grew on this land hundreds of years ago and makes it attractive to current generations so it can thrive again.

Maybe the most exciting thing about the hydroponic farm is that it exists without soil. It's a novel idea because while many people wouldn't think of doing it, it's happening right here in downtown San Antonio.

Last January, Hagney became president of the local Food Policy Council, a volunteer organization that brings together stakeholders from different communities to examine how well the local food system is working for people's health and well-being and then to develop policy recommendations to help improve it.

He'll now work with other board members on community outreach, policy research and communication with policy makers about improving access to fresh, healthy, affordable food for all.

Hagney working in the hydroponic farm at LocalSprout, where he grows kale using solar power. 

The Food Policy Council has been working on several initiatives in San Antonio, from Urban Agriculture and a Farm to School program to a Healthy Corner Stores program.

At LocalSprout, farmers can practice what they can do best while having a community of people to share in the cost of production as well as public outreach.

"Normal farming is boom or bust," Hagney said. "We're looking for consistent demand to help support our product. At LocalSprout, vendors can buy a new space without having to pay for it all by themselves."