LOCAVORE

Queen of Hearts Superfoods

Tonia Farman is on a mission to bring the power of nutritional hemp to the people

story by RUTH BERKOWITZ | photos by PALOMA AYALA

Launching a new product is challenging in the best of times. Launching one during a global pandemic takes “challenging” to a whole new level.

In February 2021, with Covid raging and making business difficult on many fronts, Tonia Farman climbed into her van and drove to Portland for an important meeting. The founder of Queen of Hearts Superfoods, Farman had been experimenting with hemp seed oil, hemp protein and hemp hearts to create a line of salad dressings. She’d made a robust Green Goddess dressing and sold it at the Hood River Farmers Market and to small local grocery stores, but the dressing required refrigeration. She needed expert help to create a shelf-stable product in order to have a scalable future.

On that rainy winter day, Farman had a meeting with Sarah Masoni from the Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center, an organization that helps pioneer new products. Revered for her “million-dollar palate,” Masoni has helped several Northwest food start-ups grow, including Salt & Straw, Bob’s Red Mill, and Choi’s Kimchi Company. The two had met several years earlier when Farman provided her with samples of her hemp seed oil, hemp hearts and hemp protein. Masoni was intrigued by the stand-alone products, but at the time Farman had yet to make something with them. So, she returned to her commercial kitchen in The Dalles and got to work.

Farman looked to her own life for product inspiration. She’s always the one bringing salads to potlucks, so she landed on the idea of creating a salad dressing. She discovered that hemp hearts cream up when you mix them with acid, like vinegar and lemon, resulting in a unique flavor and texture.

“Hemp is a superfood,” Farman says. “It’s a complete plant protein and easily digestible.” She boasts that her cold-pressed hemp seed oil is one of the most nutritional oils on the planet, packed with a range of Omega fatty acids, 21 essential amino acids, magnesium, iron and zinc.

When Farman arrived for her meeting with Masoni, she was not permitted to enter the Food Innovation Center’s facility because of Covid rules. Instead, an employee rolled out samples for Farman to taste. “Needs more of a mouthfeel,” Farman said. “Too watery.” The innovation team returned to the incubator kitchen, tweaked the recipe, then rolled

Tonia Farman makes dressing in four different flavors, which can top everything from salad to rice bowls.

FreshGreenery

SUMMER TIME

Fresh ORGANICS Greenery

PRODUCE DELI & BAKERY MEAT & SEAFOOD WINE & BEER FLORAL

Queen of Hearts gluten-free dressings are made with hemp seed oil and hemp grain, plus herbs and spices. They contain no sugar or preservatives.

out more samples. Farman’s critiques continued: “Too much tarragon forward,” “not enough of a garlic taste.”

After a few hours, Farman was satis ed with three avors: Zesty Caesar, Spicy Sesame and Sassy Italian. Within another month, the Food Innovation Center had helped Farman perfect the fourth (and original) dressing, Green Goddess, and come up with scalable recipes.

Next came the challenge of devising a system to pasteurize the mixture while retaining its exceptional nutritional value. Farman and her co-founder/husband Gregg Gnecco spent a few months perfecting a pasteurizing technique. “It’s top secret,” she says with a smile. By mid-summer 2021, Farman was ready to market her shelf-stable artisanal salad dressings.

A lucky break came in September when the Oregon Angel Food conference invited her to pitch her product via Zoom to an audience of investors and buyers. Farman, who was a graphic designer at the Seattle Art Institute in her former life, rushed to nalize labels and packaging. She also prepared samples for the 200-plus audience members so they could try her product in their homes while watching her presentation. e buyers for both New Seasons and Market of Choice grocery stores were in the audience, and they needed dressing for their shelves; some of their current vendors were struggling to ful ll orders due to supply chain issues. Farman doesn’t have supply chain problems because 95 percent of her ingredients are sourced locally and regionally.

Huckleberry’s Natural Market ROSAUERS ROSAUERS

SUPERMARKETS

1867 12th Street, Hood River • rosauers.com • 541.386.1119

Explore the HOOD RIVER FRUIT LOOP

We invite you to visit our 27 farm stands and experience the first of the season’s produce. Fresh cherries, peaches, blueberries and strawberries are all available for u-pick or for your selection in the stands. Fragrant lavender and a bounty of other flowers are in bloom and ready to adorn your home. Spend a relaxing afternoon sipping wine and enjoying the view. We look forward to your visit! Avoid the crowds by coming mid-week. Pick up a brochure and map along the way, or visit our website.

hoodriverfruitloop.com

Farman buys a variety of hemp grain grown in eastern Washington and central Montana for its nutty and buttery taste. There are many varieties of hemp, from medicinal and recreational to industrial and nutritional. Various species are grown and harvested completely differently for different purposes. Grain and fiber hemp plants are grown for the seeds (food) and stalks (fiber for industrial use). They grow from 8 to 16 feet high and require little water and labor compared to the hemp varieties grown in Western Oregon for medicinal purposes.

Hemp once grew prolifically in the United States before it was banned. The colonists brought the plant with them when they arrived in the 1600s, using it to make rope, sails and clothing, among other things. By the 1850s, the states of Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Kentucky were producing most of the country’s hemp for fabric, paper and rope. But in 1937, hemp’s popularity fizzled when concern over the film Reefer Madness led Congress to pass the Marijuana Tax Act. By 1970, the war on drugs led to a

Tonia Farman worked with a team from Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center to perfect her salad dressing recipes, and then devised a pasteurizing process that preserved their nutritional value.

prohibition of all hemp plants, including those used for food and fiber.

The ban lasted more than 40 years, until the 2014 Farm Bill cleared the way for “institutions of higher education” and state agricultural departments to grow hemp. These pilot programs were strictly monitored by their state agencies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2018, Congress reversed course completely, giving farmers the green light to grow hemp for nutritional and industrial purposes.

Around that time, Farman sold the kiteboarding school she’d founded in 2008 and launched Queen of Hearts because she “wanted to be part of the solution to our toxic food system.” Her work running Project Koru, a nonprofit helping young adult cancer survivors connect and thrive through the outdoors, was the catalyst for her career pivot. “When the group convened for meals, many had never had food that was healthy, colorful and fresh,” she says. “They talked about the processed food they ate in the hospitals, and many lacked knowledge that food is a big part of health.” Their stories nagged at Farman, prompting her to research nutritional superfoods and discover hemp.

In the spring of 2018, she attended a hemp conference in Las Vegas — one of the few participants there to learn about nutritional hemp, as opposed to marijuana and CBD. Convinced, she bought 250 pounds of hemp hearts (the inner part of the hemp seed) from Colorado, packaged and sold them at the Hood River Farmers Market. Part of her mission is to educate others about nutritional hemp. “There’s a stigma about hemp, especially here in our cannabis-friendly state,” she says.

Her customers understand the nutritional value of hemp seeds and are willing to pay the price for her products. Similarly, the buyers of New Seasons and Market of Choice who watched her Oregon Angel Food pitch were intrigued. They contacted Farman the day after the event and ordered all four of her dressings. Gnecco’s day job meant the husband-wife duo worked until the wee hours of the night to fulfill orders.

“There’s a saying that it’s easy to get a product on the store shelves, but hard to get it off the shelves,” says Farman, who was worried that her premium price (about $9 per bottle), along with the public’s lack of knowledge about the benefits of hemp, would deter buyers. “I know that once people try the dressings and understand the product, they are hooked,” she says. Purveyors of new products usually address this problem with in-store demos, but Covid regulations didn’t allow them.

Julie Gilbert, PC

Broker OR/WA 541-490-4433

julie@copperwest.com

Nate DeVol

Broker OR 541-490-0728

nate@copperwest.com

With over 16 years in the industry, Julie is one of the area’s leading Realtors. In addition to her energy and experience with smooth transactions, Julie has committed countless hours serving on Real Estate boards at the state and local level, 2x Realtor of the Year, and volunteers for local non-profits.

Nate is a second-generation Realtor and offers his clients a high level of integrity, transparency and great service. As a local small business owner (Dog River Coffee) and a former Planning Commissioner, Nate is a sharp resource for buyers in this dynamic Real Estate market.

Farman had to get creative, so she made a plan: give bottles of dressing to employees at the stores, along with notes explaining the product and the nutritional value of hemp. She surmised that if they tried it in the breakroom, they would recommend it to customers. Her plan worked and the dressings began to sell. With the easing of Covid restrictions this year, she’s now able to engage with customers at in-store demos.

Sales continue to grow, particularly since Farman has been on the food show circuit, drumming up business from recent shows in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Portland and New York. The feedback has been extraordinary, she says. In Las Vegas, hemp seed oil, and her salad dressings, were noted as one of the top five food trends. The San Francisco show resulted in new California accounts, and she’s hopeful the New York show will do the same.

Getting a new product off the ground is always satisfying. Perhaps more so when it happens during a pandemic.

Tonia Farman and her husband and business partner, Gregg Gnecco, fill bottles in their commercial kitchen.

Find Queen of Hearts Superfoods dressing and oil at Treebird Market and The Farm Stand in Hood River, and order online at queenofhearts.com Ruth Berkowitz is a mediator and writer living in Hood River.

Washougal River Cape Horn Trail Public Art