Small West Virginia town is home to organic tofu factory

Organic tofu products produced by Spring Creek Natural Foods

SPENCER, West Virginia (AP) -- When a group of hippies set up shop in this small rural town during the 1970s, residents thought Spring Creek Natural Foods was a front for a drug operation.

Today, the organic tofu manufacturer with its 15 employees is flourishing, supplying soy products to several states along the East Coast.

"They thought we were outrageous but over the years we've blended and they've blended," said Mark Bossert, one of 10 current stockholders and the company's treasurer and financial manager.

While Spencer's 2,300 residents are more likely to shop at the new Wal-Mart than at a health foods store, Spring Creek has brought some notice to this town about 50 miles north of Charleston.

"We get calls about them from all over the country," said Mayor Terry Williams.

The business was founded by a group of former big-city residents who wanted to live off the land. Rural Roane County was attractive because it lacked interstates, railroads and a major river.

After discovering the dream wasn't an easy reality, several of the would-be back-to-the-landers turned to selling their homemade tofu, a vegetarian protein source made from soybeans. The first products were made in a home kitchen.

"They needed something that would allow them to make a living where they liked to live, doing something they could believe in," said Bossert, who joined Spring Creek a few years later.

When banks refused to provide start-up money, the group recruited friends, borrowed and repaired second-hand equipment and moved into a building on the verge of being condemned. Those who wanted to be part of the business had to put in sweat equity before they could share in the profits.

Equipment was added in the 1980s and the business has since been restructured into a traditional stockholder setup.

Spring Creek is easy to miss -- hidden away east of town in a former Pepsi bottling plant it shares with a hair salon.

Inside the painted concrete building, bags of soybeans purchased from a certified organic farm in Mount Vernon, Ohio, are stacked 10 feet high, waiting to be processed into a very firm tofu called nigari, soy milk and other soy-based products.

In another room, employees work two shifts, five days a week, converting about 6,000 pounds of soybeans into as much as 15,000 pounds of soy products each week.

"It's the best tofu I've had and I've lived in many different states and tried a lot of tofu," said Roger Glass, staff coordinator for Mountain Peoples Market in Morgantown. "The texture is so firm that you can grate it and use it in place of meat. It really absorbs other flavors well."

The tofu process begins by soaking the dried soybeans in water for about 12 hours.

A worker, dressed in knee-high waterproof boots and an apron then dumps the plump yellow beans into a stainless steel vat where they are ground and mixed with water to form a paste. The slurry is then mixed with more water and cooked in a pressure kettle for about 10 minutes.

An extractor then separates the liquids from the solids. The resulting soy milk spews out of the machine into another stainless steel vat, where it's hand-mixed with sea salt until it curdles.

"That is the difference between our tofu and mass produced -- the hand curdling," Bossert says.

The curds are then separated by hand from the whey, a yellow-green liquid high in protein, and placed in a cheesecloth-lined stainless steel mold to form the tofu. Since Spring Creek lacks the expensive equipment to capture and dry the whey, it merely washes down the drain in the concrete floor.

Some of the leftover soybean husks are used as a binder to make imitation meat products. The bulk, however, is donated to local farmers for livestock feed.

"Our ultimate vision is to get out of this building, set up our own organic livestock operation and utilize a lot of these byproducts that we are discarding now," Bossert says.

The company's products, which include a non-meat burger, soy sausage, marinated and baked tofu, smoked tofu and fresh soy milk, are available in most states east of the Mississippi River through health food distributors.

The Federation of Ohio River Cooperatives in Columbus, Ohio, is Spring Creek's largest distributor, supplying products to health food stores, natural foods stores, restaurants, cooperatives and buying clubs in 12 states.

"Of the 6,000 products we carry, their tofu is in the top 20 sales-wise for us," said Bob Pickford, Midwest's director of operations. "It's a sought-after product that has found its way into some traditional grocery stores because of its quality."

A 16-ounce block of Spring Creek tofu retails for about $2, while 8 ounces of the marinated and smoked tofu sells for up to $3. A gallon of soy milk costs about $2.75.

Mistie Perdue, an employee at Health Foods Etc. in Charleston, drives about an hour every two weeks to pick up "the Cadillac of tofu."

Tofu is gaining mainstream acceptance because of its health benefits.

Research has shown problems like menopausal symptoms, osteoporosis, cancer and heart disease improve with soy consumption. And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration now allows product labels that tout soy's ability to lower cholesterol.

The United Soybean Board estimates that soy food consumption will increase 10 percent a year for the next five years, said Mike Orso, a board spokesman in St. Louis, Missouri.

Sales of soy milk, tofu and other soy-based foods are expected to reach $2.56 billion by the end of the year and $3.67 billion by 2002, up from $852 million in 1992, according to Soyatech Inc., an industry consulting firm in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Spring Creek's sales have grown by 20 percent a year to about $600,000. About 80 percent of that comes from tofu sales.

Although Spring Creek has stayed small by choice, the business "has the potential to be one of the biggest soy dairies in the country," said Glass of Mountain Peoples Market. "They have focused on being a good local supplier and if they want to, they could hold their own in most any market."

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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United Soybean Board
Soyatech, Inc.
The Soy Protein Council

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