Downtown Twisp is less of a tourist destination than the Old West-styled town of Winthrop just up the road, but those who take the time to mosey down Twisp’s quiet main street may discover more about the Methow Valley than those who simply speed past. The Made in the Methow Co-op store features an appealing, eclectic mix of local foods and crafts. Refrigerators stocked with tamales, specialty cakes, grass-fed beef, and soy sausage are nestled among the wares of local herbalists, musicians, potters, and jewelers.

This venture began with the food. Local food production in the Methow Valley has been well supported for years by a large and popular weekly farmers’ market. In 1997, some of those vendors began talking about increasing food production capacity in the community. There was a lot of produce being locally grown, but not much of it was being sold as higher-value products like jams and salsas. By law, food products offered for sale must be produced in a licensed commercial kitchen, but such a kitchen is costly to build. So a handful of vendors and folks interested in community development began discussing the idea of creating a shared kitchen facility in the Methow Valley.

After forming a sponsoring community organization – the Partnership for a Sustainable Methow – and surveying potential kitchen users, state funds were secured to develop a business plan and build a kitchen in downtown Twisp. Joyce Campbell is a farmer, soy foods producer, and one of the early leaders of the kitchen and the Partnership. She remembers, “We received a two year grant that gave us a part-time manager and all of the equipment. The grant was matched by the community through donations and all kinds of help.” The kitchen opened in 2000, and salsas, cakes, and jams were added to the mix of locally made and sold food products. Adding a walk-in cooler provided much-needed cold storage space for farmers.

In the kitchen, Ann Wagstaff makes hot sauces and salsas that she sells in local stores and at the farmers’ market. She remarks, “It just helps a lot not to have to do that huge outlay of cash to get your own commercial kitchen. There are a lot of requirements to do that, and if there is community effort and community donations to get it going, it eliminates a huge stumbling block for a lot of small businesses.” Ann’s business is a part time endeavor so the kitchen has been perfect for her. She explains, “I can rent it by the hour and it has all the equipment I need. It is also excellent for people who are experimenting with a product.”

Over time, the kitchen has expanded its scope to serve a broader base of community needs. From the beginning, the founding members envisioned that the Partnership would encompass more than agriculture, supporting local businesses across the board. Its mission is “to encourage and support sustainable economic development in the Methow Valley through activities that preserve the rural environment and quality of life.” Partnership executive director, Sue Koptonak, remembers when the kitchen opened: “We were experiencing a lot of job loss. The timber market was changing. The agricultural market was changing. We were losing businesses and downtown Twisp had a lot of empty storefronts.”

The kitchen was designed to be a business incubator that would support and spawn new entrepreneurs in the valley, food-based and otherwise. In 2001, the front of the kitchen on Twisp’s main street was transformed into the Made in the Methow retail store. Ann explains, “We decided to expand the revenues and put in the retail store out front. It has been a really good thing. It’s a place for people to sell locally-made products and it ties in well to our larger goal.” Ann comments that they had always had a vision of being able to sell the food products out front that were made in back, but they didn’t have enough variety of food items made in the valley to warrant having a store. She says, “So we opened it up to anything made in the Methow, and now it’s art and stained glass and hand crafted items — and food!”

Today the kitchen and store are incorporated as a cooperative business, and members include farmers who rent storage space in the cooler, folks who use the kitchen to bake pies and pizzas to sell at the weekly farmers’ market, and local artists and food producers who sell their wares at the store. Kitchen users pay an hourly rate for use of the facility, and those who sell their products in the store volunteer their time and/or pay a commission on sales. Local subscription farms rent space in the cooler to keep produce fresh for customer pick up, along with pear and apple growers who need long-term storage. The facility is also used by caterers, home canners, and local event organizers.

Two businesses have successfully graduated from the shared kitchen to their own facilities – Joyce Campbell’s Methow Valley Foods and Salyna’s Specialty Cakes. Cooperative member Sara Hartzell – whose husband sells carved wooden bowls – explains, “Currently we have about 22 merchants who sell products in the store. The store has carried the kitchen for a while since those two businesses have incubated and grown. We are hoping for more businesses to move in here and get started, but with the economy the way it is, we haven’t had any new kitchen users over the last year. It’s been great to have the store because it’s enabled the kitchen to continue to be here.”

“It’s really a labor of love,” Sara continues. “The vision everybody has for the Methow Valley is that it can support residents here and help people start businesses. We don’t have any industry in the area, so the big income for the whole region is tourism. We find a lot of people in our area don’t have jobs in the wintertime; they go on unemployment year after year, and that is a strain to the economy here. So this is one way everybody can help out.”

While most of the store’s customers are tourists, locals come in regularly for the frozen soups and beef. A web page is in the works so people who have visited the area can access a piece of the Methow Valley from anywhere. But web visits are unlikely to capture the experience of browsing among the wreaths and knitted hats hanging from branches, the stained glass pieces glinting in the window, the smell of herbs and scented lotions, and the blackboard on the back wall describing the bounty of the Methow.

Contact
108 N. Glover Street
Twisp, WA 98856
Tel: 509-997-7482

Made in the Methow Co-op
Ann Wagstaff, Kitchen Coordinator
PO Box 116
Carlton, WA 98814
Tel/Fax: 509-997-5420