Clay Trainum, co-owner of Autumn Olive Farm, wants farmers and restaurants to operate with integrity. (Photo courtesy Clay Trainum)
Updated 12:02 a.m. June 21.
Clay Trainum, co-owner of Autumn Olive Farms, started his business in 2011 with the desire of providing the finest quality pork to his consumers. His business model was based on integrity and providing a premium product.
In 2016, Trainum was informed that a smiling picture of himself with a piglet graced a Nelson County brewery menu, which said, “We proudly support our immediate community by serving finely crafted local products from these neighboring businesses” — however, Autumn Olive hadn’t sold products to the brewery since 2014. "We had no idea," said Trainum about the use of his photo. After Trainum contacted the brewery, they removed the photo.
Trainum had a similar incident occur at a high-volume Washington, D.C., restaurant. Autumn Olive remained on the restaurant’s chalkboard of local purveyors, yet they hadn’t supplied the restaurant in years. Trainum said the restaurant removed Autumn Olive's name after being contacted.
“My greatest concern is that the public becomes disillusioned,” says Trainum. “We put a lot of effort to produce a healthy product, and people are willing to pay more for [it]. When that good is lost why bother, why bother. It’s really damaging to everybody and undermines the food movement."
Travis Croxton, co-owner of Rappahannock Oyster Co., has experienced similar situations.
“I have tons of experience with this — people buy us one time and put us on their menu and we never hear from them again. We’ve heard horror stories,” says Croxton.
When you dine at a restaurant, how often do you question what's labeled on the menu? When it says local or mentions a farm's name, chances are you believe the sourcing. Embrace it, in fact. The words can evoke a feeling of pride in your community, a sense of promoting an ideology that extends beyond the table.
Allegations made in a recent Facebook post by a former Little Saint employee sent us into Little Saint's kitchen yesterday and had us paging through their invoices, upon co-owner Liz Kincaid's invitation. She says the former employee's allegations are false.
Dean Carls II worked for Little Saint for three months. He says he was drawn to Little Saint because it promoted an ethos he wanted to be part of, but claims that over time, the restaurant strayed from what it promoted to the public. Carls claims that products didn't always match what was listed on menus and substitutions weren't revealed to diners.
The Little Saint website states: “Little Saint is a purveyor of Local + Thoughtfully Sourced New Virginian Cuisine from Chef Alex Enggist.” The restaurant's building itself advertises, in crisp lettering, "Thoughtfully-sourced Food + Drink."
“Everyone that works here cares about locally sourcing; we're a small restaurant and know [purveyors] personally,” says Kincaid. “It’s our motto painted on the side of the building. We’ve never claimed to be 100 percent local. We have sustainably, thoughtfully sourced products, not all local.”
We contacted some of Little Saint's local purveyors — Idle Hands Bakery, New Frontier Bison, Autumn Olive Farms and Rappahannock Oyster Co. — and confirmed their partnerships with Little Saint. (Rappahannock grows a private-label oyster for Little Saint on the York River.).
Trainum says Little Saint has purchased 70-plus pounds of his pork per week since the restaurant opened. "That, in my experience, usually is good confirmation they're doing what they say they're doing," he says.
On Tuesday evening, we reviewed invoices with Kincaid and Enggist dating to October 2017, when the restaurant opened. While the in-house menu aligned with invoices, we had questions about two online menu items. The online menu listed North Carolina's Ashley Farms chicken. On Tuesday evening, invoices listing West Creek chicken – a brand distributed by Performance Food Service — were found but no invoice was found listing Ashley Farms. On late Wednesday night, Kincaid shared a May 16 and April 23 invoice for Ashley Farms through Performance Food Service. The online menu also listed Virginia scallops, and no invoice specifying Virginia scallops was found Tuesday evening. In their refrigerator Tuesday evening were wild-caught scallops from Japan. On Wednesday night through email, Kincaid said that they had been getting Virginia scallops for several months through Sam Rust, a seafood distributor, but those invoices just say, "dry packed" and didn't specifically denote that they were from Virginia. Just this week, Kincaid said they had gotten the wild-caught scallops from Japan through Performance Food Service.
Kincaid and Enggist say they don’t update the online menu as frequently as the in-house menu, which reflects seasonal changes. Since our visit Tuesday evening, the online menu has been updated.
“Since I opened the restaurant, it’s always been with the intent to be as clean and professional and honest with people as possible — cook good food with good people for good people. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,” Enggist says.
Trainum has a simple solution for restaurants: If you run out of a listed product, let the diner know and remove it from your menu as soon as you can.
“I just want people to know what they are getting themselves into," says Carls, after we shared Tuesday's findings at LIttle Saint with him. "I'm not trying to shut them down.”
This isn’t the first time that restaurants have had their practices with local purveyors examined. In 2016 the Tampa Bay Times featured a six-part series, “Farm to Fable” exploring the local food movement, how restaurants jumped on board, and frequent misrepresentations on menus.
Following the series, the state made changes, and Florida health inspectors are now equipped with a 37-page guide that explains terms such as “organic.” Inspectors now pay close attention to food descriptions, specific ingredients and suppliers listed on menus, blackboards and chalkboards.
Julie Henderson, director of the food division of the Virginia Department of Health, says that menus assist staff during routine inspections, and regulations address food being presented "honestly," but definitions are lacking.
Title 12 Chapter 421 of food regulations from the VDH states, “food shall be offered for human consumption in a way that does not mislead or misinform the consumer.”
But there is one catch — the regulations do not address "local" products and “local” is not defined. “It is up to the seller to define local product and the buyer to inquire as to what local means to the seller,” says Henderson. “I can’t say we don’t regulate or have an impact on consumer fraud because we do, but what I can say is that because local is not defined, we don’t have a way to classify.”
Henderson says that the VDH is focused more on the safety of the consumer — whether the restaurant has proper equipment and storage, where the product is coming from and if the food has been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“We look in the walk-in and if they had Julia’s uncured local hot dogs, but are selling Susan’s hot dogs, we wouldn’t debit them,” says Henderson. “We don’t have the authority and as long as it’s a safe food product, we don’t say you have to have the exact name of the product on the menu.
“We're not opposed to regulating and enforcing it, we just don’t have the authority [currently],” says Henderson.
Trainum says Autumn Olive has thought of having restaurants sign an agreement, which stipulates, for instance, that 70 to 80 percent of their pork must come from Autumn Olive in order to list them as a local supplier, but enforcement is the problem. Trainum has more than 100 clients and has no way of policing.
“You think you’re buying a Rolex and you’re buying a knock-off,” says Trainum. “I hope the consumer doesn’t lose confidence in a system of providing quality local food … hopefully people don’t give up on the integrity of the system. Farmers can cheat, restaurants can cheat, or they can do it right.”
