Big B's is Better
Delicious Orchards and Big B’s Jeff Schwartz
makes the leap from activist-farmer to businessman
By Stewart Oksenhorn

Traffic is an unusual problem to have in rural, agricultural Paonia. Spring freezes and disappearing orchard land are the typical daily concerns, but Jeff Schwartz has a potential traffic issue. So many cars are turning off two-lane Highway 133 into Schwartz’s Delicious Orchards farm stand that the Colorado Department of Transportation ordered him to fund a traffic study.  (Ultimately, the numbers did not dictate an even greater expense—the installation of a turning lane—but it was close.)

The flow of cars pulling in can seem like a direct reflection of the vitality of 37-year-old Schwartz himself. Delicious Orchards, which was a U-pick operation when Schwartz bought it in 2006, is now a Paonia magnet. The farm stand is more like a foodie’s vision of a grocery market, with fruits and veggies picked right out back, as well as locally produced honey, cheeses, caramels, jerky and a wine shop and tasting room boasting only regional wines. Tucked in back is a yarn and gift shop. (Jeff’s wife, Tracey, who is integral to the business operation, is what you would call a “yarnie.”)

Since opening Delicious Orchards, Schwartz has installed a low-key, low-cost campground for tourists. The campground’s picnic tables don’t simply attract tired motorists, but anyone with an appetite: The latest addition to Delicious is the WorldCafé, a counter service that dishes out handmade tamales, soups, sandwiches and made-on-premises ice cream.

Extensive as it is, Delicious Orchards is, in a way, a mere appendage of the main business. Eight miles down the road is Big B’s, a juice-making facility that Schwartz bought in 2003. When he took over the business, distribution was from Ft. Collins to Santa Fe. Today Big B’s organic products are available from Salt Lake City to Texas, while Colorado is blanketed with the company’s spiced juices, lemonade and the biggest seller, the country’s only widely available organic, unpasteurized apple cider. The volume of juice pressed has increased fivefold in seven years and sales have climbed at an annual rate of 30 percent.

“Raising a garden to sell at farmers’ markets—that wasn’t the way we were going to do it,” says Schwartz, who does, in fact, sell at two farmers’ markets—in Basalt and Crested Butte—partly as a family activity for Jeff, Tracey and their two young kids. “We weren’t going to sludge through every day of the year. We knew we had to be bigger, and grow. We’re the new energy.”

New energy, of course, is not always looked upon favorably by those who generated the old energy. But it’s hard to see the Schwartzes’ contribution being disparaged, and Jeff believes he is “respected by both the new and old agricultural communities.”

Partly what old aggies have to respect is that Schwartz is as interested in growing food as business. The 16-acre orchard out back of Delicious, what used to be Kokes Fruit Ranch, is in top shape, as Schwartz has removed older trees, expanded the varieties of apples and peaches grown and added an asparagus crop alongside the cherries, apricots, plums and pears. Down the road at Big B’s, all the apples used are from the North Fork Valley, which addresses two longstanding issues: that local farmland had been put to other uses, and that Paonia produce was mostly being sent out of the area for processing and consumption.

“When we moved to Paonia, people were pulling fruit trees, getting rid of orchards. We’re doing our part to keep the Valley in agriculture. We’re helping consume all these apples that don’t have a home,” says Schwartz, who looks and dresses like a farmer (ponytail and muscles, ratty jeans and long-sleeve shirt for sun protection). A complaint of the Valley Organic Growers Association has been that products so thoughtfully grown had routinely been consumed elsewhere. The Delicious farm stand provided part of the solution.

“We said, ‘Bring us your stuff and we’ll sell it,’” Schwartz says.  “We wanted to be a clearinghouse for all the things made here.” Like his fruits, Schwartz’s business has grown organically. Each piece of the operation has been built from an apparent demand or surplus capacity.  Leftover cucumbers and peppers? Install a kitchen and make pickles and salsa. Some space in back? A wine room. Loads of bruised apples? Integrate an orchard with a juice-making business.

“It sounds like we’re doing a ridiculous amount of things,” he says. “And how can we do them well? It’s because they’re all related, and we’ve added one piece at a time. It’s always about not having waste; what makes sense so we can be as efficient as possible?” People, rather than food, were what started Schwartz on the path to his organic empire. A native of the affluent New Jersey suburb of Short Hills, he went through heavy metal and Grateful Dead phases before heading to CU-Boulder to study religion (“I didn’t understand one iota of it,” he says) and, more productively, sociology.

Especially interesting was the program INVST—International/ National Voluntary Service Training. “We were trained by some of the greatest activists and thinkers around in how to see what a community needs and to implement social change,” he says.

Schwartz went to northern Arizona to teach Permaculture techniques to a Navajo group. At a workshop he met Tracey, who had a background in protest movements—at the time, she was protesting the implementation of coal mining on Navajo lands—but was looking to use her master’s in environmental agriculture in more proactive ways.

“Instead of protesting, I thought about solutions,” she says.  “Growing food was the answer. We could make the world a better place through food, instead of spending so much energy fighting things.”

Jeff, who had also worked in Arizona for a landscape company specializing in native plants, and in eastern Colorado on wolf preservation, and Tracey went hunting for a place where they could focus on food. Paonia met all their criteria: mountains, community, a strong organic culture. In 2000 they moved in and got busy in the agricultural scene—managing an asparagus farm, buying their own plot, starting a small CSA.

In 2002 Jeff started working at Big B’s. A year later, Big B’s founder Bernie Heideman floated the idea of selling the operation, and Schwartz weighed whether he wanted to make the leap from activist-farmer to businessman.

“I didn¹t know an account receivable from an account payable.  I was an efficient laborer, but had no business savvy at all,” he says. But he knew where to look for guidance: his father, who owned a string of parking lots and car washes; and his brother, Seth, an MBA (and, though based in Florida, a working partner in the Paonia operations). Schwartz took the leap: “Big B’s hadn’t begun to tap its potential, so we said ‘Sure.’ It was the scariest night of my life. But it was one of [my] top two or three decisions.  It allowed us to do what we love to do. It allowed us to be so much more effective as localists, locavores and community builders.”

Schwartz is pleased that, as much as Big B’s has grown, it remains small-scale, the last of the West’s independent organic juice businesses. “Hitting New York and Chicago—that’s not our thing. Because there’s such a market here. We’re preventing these apples from getting shipped to Arkansas, for the Gerber baby food company,” he says.

Still, he knew early on there would be growth. Looking back to when he bought the old Kokes Fruit Ranch, which welcomed visitors with a plywood sign and a solid metal door, the Schwartzes say they’re not surprised they had to widen the driveway fourfold, and still have traffic issues.  “When we started, we looked at each other and said, ‘Are we really the only ones doing an organic produce stand, in the heart of Colorado’s organic farmland?’” Jeff says.

GO FIND IT !

Big B’s Fabulous Juices
386 High St., Hotchkiss
970.872.3065
www.bigbjuices.com

Delicious Orchards Organic Farm Market
39126 Hwy. 133, Paonia
970.527.1110
www.deliciousorchardstore.com