SOUTHOLD—This time of year, Southold resident Karen Karp is putting raspberry bushes in her new garden and tending to her oysters. But she’s also scouring her food community—not just for newly offered comestibles, but also for innovations. Coming up with ways to improve food businesses—from developing a New York City wholesale farmers market and local food options for city school kids, to studying ways for East End farmers to better market their products—comes naturally for the 47-year-old Karp. She descends from a long line of food and agriculture entrepreneurs—and her roots in the LI food and farm economy run deep. Karp Resources, her consulting business, was established in 1990 and is now based in Southold and New York City. Edible’s Laura Weiss spoke to Karp about her determination help food organizations mesh together their social, environmental—and financial—bottom lines.

LW: I understand your family were sort of Long Island pioneers.

KK: My great grandfather started a feed company in Brooklyn. In the late 1920s, he brought his family to Farmingdale. He set up a depot right next to the train station—it’s actually condominiums now. When I take the train to the city, I pass that building all the time.

LW: Farmingdale? There weren’t too many Jewish families living there back then.

KK: My family was the founding Jewish family in Farmingdale, and my grandfather or grandfather started the temple there. Then my grandfather was solicited by the USDA, and they sent him to Cornell. He was part of the very first group of people who were developing chemical fertilizers. He came back to Farmingdale and transformed the company from a feed company to a fertilizer company. Great heritage, right?

LW: That’s what they did then. It was supposed to be the modern way.

KK: My grandfather sold the company to Dow Chemical in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, and at that point my father was out of a job. He had all these relationships with the farmers here and he started a real estate company. His business was of helping the farmers sell to developers. But in 1974 or 1976 my father did broker the first transfer of development rights in the U.S. and certainly out here on LI and that was with Joseph M. Gergela’s father’s farm in Jamesport.

LW: How did you get involved in the food business?

KK: My father got me the first job in a restaurant when I was 16, and it was a seafood restaurant, Captain Bill’s in Bayshore. I loved the restaurant business. I was too young to be a waitress, so my job was to assist the bookkeeper. When I moved to New York, I waited on tables and by the time I was done with college, I was managing restaurants.

LW: So your interest in food, it’s in your genes?

KK: Totally. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father and me, we’re all entrepreneurs. No one in my family ever said “oh hey, wouldn’t it be great if you went into the food business?” because they were so agriculture-focused. I don’t think they thought of themselves as being in the food business.

LW: How did you get from restaurant consulting to being someone who does projects that are about the social and environmental aspects of food?

KK: In 1992, I decided to volunteer for Share our Strength. There was one of the recipient agencies, it no longer exists, called the Food and Hunger Hotline, that was going to start a nonprofit restaurant. I wanted to create a restaurant that was a real restaurant that had an environment of dignity with good food, where this population could use their food stamps, but also open to the public. The restaurant was called One City Café and it was on West 14th Street.

LW: So that was a project where you started to think about the social consequences of what you were doing?

KK: It was the first project where I started to integrate a social bottom line into what I do as a consultant.

LW: How did you figure that out? How did you find that place in the market?

KK: I’ve got to tell you, it was intuitive. In order to rationalize being a restaurant consultant doing these three-star restaurants, I also had to do something for people who didn’t have. I balanced these two worlds against each other.

LW: But now you’re into the wholesale farmers market, projects that I think of as residing in yuppie land.

KK: The wholesale farmers market is far from yuppie. It’s a place where distributors and restaurants and manufacturers and institutions will be able to access local food.

LW: Is it going to really happen?

KK: After the events of last week [ex-Governor Spitzer’s resignation], I don’t know, because Governor Spitzer was the biggest proponent of this project. He said in January that we were going to break ground on this project. I can’t tell you how pissed off I am at him!

LW: With the New York City Schools project, how did you get this huge bureaucracy to make a shift to feeding kids locally grown food?

KK: In a way, they’re not really shifting. We’re developing the products that exist in the marketplace and that are competitive products to what they’re currently buying.

LW: And now there’s the whole question of organic versus local. Should you buy local even if it isn’t organic?

KK: The popularity of organic food was really the first quasi-mainstream thing here that made people think, “what’s wrong with their current food if this food is better?” Local came along as kind of an outgrowth of that. People who were really thinking down the chain. If it’s organic, I want to know how it’s produced. It’s the next logical question. And now, all these food scares, that’s really the kicker. When that spinach thing happened, we were wrapping up the wholesale farmers market. It was the best thing for our project because people need to be aware that they can’t trust the food system.

LW: Out here on the East End, farmers say, “why should I bother shipping products to the city when I’m making plenty of money at my farm stand?”

KK: They were all wholesalers originally. The North Fork was the breadbasket of New York City. Farmers saw their wholesale businesses going down because of the nationalization of agriculture between the late ‘60s and ‘80s No one needed to grow iceberg lettuce here any more, which actually doesn’t grow so well here, because you could get it in three days in California. So for farmers in the Northeast, it was a total shock to their businesses. The farmers who were the innovative farmers decided to go retail. But that’s not all the farmers, it’s a select group.

LW: I’m assuming there are other farmers out here who are receptive to a wholesale farmers market.

KK: Out here, there are probably a handful. But New York State has 36,000 farms. They are not the Hudson Valley, Long Island chi-chi places you and I like to visit. These are four-, five-, six-, seven-thousand acre farms growing row crops. Those farmers need to sell their stuff to someone, too. The wholesale farmers market is really for a group of farmers that have been called, “agriculture of the middle.”

LW: What does that mean?

KK: They are farmers that are too big to really make it work in a Greenmarket or farmers market structure. They’re too small to make it on grand wholesale, and they’re too big to make it on direct retail. We have identified four times the demand from wholesale buyers than the existing supply, which is a billion dollars of demand in New York City alone from wholesale buyers for local food.

LW: How did you find clients who reflect your philosophy about sustainability, social good, and profitability meshing together in a successful food venture?

KK: Sustainability is essentially a system where you have a triple bottom line: financial, social and environmental. No business can exist unless it financially is doing well. Businesses that incorporate environmental or social objectives to the detriment of the financial bottom line are never going to work.

LW: How do you instill business practices so these food businesses can become sustainable?

KK: Well, that is our work. That’s the challenge on the table every single day.

LW: Which clients reflect that kind of work?

KK: I found out about an organization called the Sustainability Institute. They started a subgroup called the Sustainable Food Lab in 2004. They are creating a safe space for leaders in corporations, the biggest food companies—Unilever, Sysco, U.S. Food Service, Coke, General Mills—to come together to learn, discuss, and enquire.

LW: Aren’t these large corporations where the change in the food we eat really has to come from?

KK: My biggest job is to work with their business coalition members to get some projects going. The first real accomplishment was a booklet [The Changing Vocabulary of Food Purchasing, a guide for food service professionals about sustainable food and agriculture.] Then, I did a training at U.S. Food Service last year. They have a private label brand, called Monarch Foods, and there are people who are responsible for buying all the food that gets into these branded products. U.S. Food Service is pretty well staffed for sustainability. Yet these category managers didn’t really have any education about it. I went in and teamed up with someone from the World Wildlife Fund, and we did a half-day session, sustainability 101.

LW: These companies are pretty entrenched in the way they do things. How do you execute this big culture shift?

KK: That is the question. It’s a matter of relationship-building and trust. Cisco is doing a lot of stuff. They don’t talk about it. Why don’t they talk about it? Of the 100,000 products they sell, if they start talking about the 5,000 products they’re doing something good on, the feedback from the rest of the world is, “what’s wrong with the rest of your food if these 5,000 products are so great?”

LW: What about out on the East End? Is there any talk of large farmers markets?

KK: A study [by another consultant] found low feasibility [for a LI wholesale farmer’s market] but the LI Farm Bureau and the LI Market Authority still had money—and interest—to investigate what would be good for farmers and the East End and hired us to do preliminary planning for some kind of brick-and-mortar project to honor
and promote LI agriculture. We found a good deal of interest among farmers to have a “one stop shop” for visitors to the East End to have to learn about local ag, and
where they could go off to, to learn more.

LW: What about your work with the Peconic Land Trust?

KK: The Peconic Land Trust hired us to do a “white paper” which explored directions to make best use of their underutilized acreage and also increase their presence in the community. One of the suggestions was to purchase the Amagansett Farmers Market—a community “landmark” and not much of a farmers market (or even a good food market) any longer. It happens to butt right up against their farm, Quail Hill, but has maxed out on community participation. In the end they decided to pursue the Amagansett Farmers Market, and are just about in contract with them to purchase. This will be huge and very innovative.

LW: How is it to operate a business out of Southold? This is lovely, charming, peaceful and quiet. But it takes two hours to get into the city.

KK: I have an apartment in the city and I’m there two or three days in the week. Tomorrow is day one of a new lease of an office space in NYC so we’ll have two offices. The three full-time consultants I have are based in NY.

LW: Why not make these people come out to Southold?

KK: You said it: it’s a two-and-a-half-hour commute. But two days a week I can be here, and I can be in the environment I like.