BRATTLEBORO — With sales of her company’s products dropping at the Publix supermarket chain, Nancy Cain, co-founder of Against the Grain in Brattleboro, decided to travel down to Florida to see for herself what was going on.
Cain, whose company’s gluten-free frozen pizzas are sold in 15,000 stores nationwide, toured 31 Florida Publix stores in mid-November and found that the frozen pizza category overall had been shaved down to a fraction of its former size.
“Of all the products that were in there with us 18 months ago, we were the only survivors,” said Cain of frozen pizzas, including gluten-free, natural and organic. “They are shrinking the category. I saw freezer doors devoted to meat alternatives that weren’t there before.”
That development didn’t surprise Cain, a former college professor and investment banker who now owns — with her husband — a $20 million-a-year company with 100 employees in Brattleboro. For as long as she’s been in business, she said, gluten-free baked goods have moved in one direction or another in response to nonstop competitive innovation and ever-changing trends.
Cain, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology, spends a large part of each day studying food industry websites and mainstream media for clues about who is inventing what in the world of gluten-free baked goods. Lately she’s been hearing from stores looking for products that are paleo or ketogenic, both eating plans based on low-carb diets. She has saved a page from a mainstream food distributor catalogue that shows several types of insect protein available for sale.
“There are new startups every single day of the year, and they could be making crackers made of cheese, insect protein, the weird fringe things, high-protein muffins,” she said.
Another big disrupter is pizza with a cauliflower crust — a development that annoys her.
“It just slays me, because they still have more carbs than our crusts,” she said. “It has become a sensation. It’s a ruse; it’s not different. When you put dried cauliflower powder in something it’s not adding much to the nutrition of it.”
That said, Cain relishes the constant market disruptions, because her favorite part of the job is going into the test kitchen and trying out new recipes. Cain, 69, loves a challenge.
“The biggest regret I have is, I don’t have a lifetime to build this,” she said. “I wish to hell I had started it not at age 55, which we did; I wish I had started it at 30. This world is so much more interesting than academia. Every single day you learn about something new.” Cain wrote an animal science behavior book in her prior career and a gluten-free cookbook available in hardcover, paperback and on Kindle.
“I had no idea my biggest talent was developing recipes,” she said. “It’s really fun.”
A gluten-free pioneer
Cain and her husbandTom — a writer who has a doctorate in music composition and worked at Goldman Sachs — started Against the Grain in 2006 after she came up with gluten-free recipes for Tom and one of their sons, both of whom have celiac, an immune disorder that requires people to avoid gluten or risk damaging their small intestine.
The timing was perfect. Interest in gluten-free products was rising rapidly around the country at that moment as people became more aware of celiac disease and gluten intolerance. Against the Grain took off, and is still growing. It has appeared on Vermont Business Magazine’s list of fastest-growing companies — often at the No. 1 or No. 2 spot – every year since 2014.
Pizzas are by far the company’s largest category; Against the Grain produces 20,000 a week at its Brattleboro factory. The company also makes bagels, rolls, bread and other items. And Cain likes to experiment with desserts and other baked goods that the company sells in its factory store, which does a brisk business from its spot next to the manufacturing plant in a Brattleboro industrial park.
As food companies turn out new gluten-free products for the $17 billion industry, Cain constantly experiments in her test kitchen.
“We do a lot of R & D with Beyond Meat (a meat substitute), with jackfruit, coconut, pea protein, tiger nuts,” she said. “We constantly play around with new ingredients. The most recent one I just got was defatted sunflower flour — basically the hulls that come from processing sunflower seeds. It was really interesting stuff. I read about it and ordered a sample from New Jersey.”
‘I’ve made my peace with Walmart‘
Cain has a mildly subversive bent; the company used to sell T-shirts proclaiming “GF yourself” and recently commissioned a Colchester artist to paint a huge mural on the side of their building showing an arcadian Parisian bakery scene with tapioca plants growing outside and the company dog peering out of an upstairs window.
Cain is the rare local business owner who doesn’t complain about Vermont’s high taxes.
“I sound like Elizabeth Warren or something, but you know, I think those of us that make more money need to pay more,” she said. “Who is going to pay for our schools, our infrastructure, everything else? Taxes don’t bother me.”
That sentiment translates to a sustainable mission for the company. Starting pay at Against the Grain is $15 – with medical benefits and paid time off — and the company makes a point of saying on its website that most of the office staff was promoted from the factory floor. The company uses only Vermont eggs and Cabot cheese on its pizzas.
Accordingly, company leaders were reluctant to move into large discount chains and into Walmart.
“They came to us several times and said they wanted to test-market in their stores,” Cain said of Walmart. “We were like, ‘I don’t know how we feel about this.’”
But over the years, Walmart demonstrated a commitment to organic and natural food, she said. She came to see the huge chain as a chance for rural consumers to buy organic and natural products that they might not be able to find otherwise. Now they’re in 3,500 Walmarts.
“Walmart has completely turned around,” she said. “They have in many cases more natural and organic products than any grocery stores. It’s pretty interesting to see people in the middle of nowhere buying our products.”
A future unknown
Like all companies, Against the Grain has to balance a need for innovation with a pragmatic imperative to continue doing what it does best. A disastrous foray into cookie-making three years ago cost the company half a million dollars, Cain estimated. Meanwhile, the battle for gluten-free frozen pizza shelf space is fierce; even Oprah Winfrey has launched a competing line, with help from Kraft.
Against the Grain recently introduced its first non-frozen products: three cake mixes. The baked goods and other items that Cain makes in the test kitchen will never see mass distribution, Cain said; the company doesn’t have the money to produce and market them.
But she’s not overly concerned about seeing her products squeezed out at Publix. Cain is scheduled to meet soon with the chain’s buyer to present some alternatives that the company has already had in the works, including pizza crusts. And, she noted, the hunger for frozen pizza of all kinds doesn’t show any signs of abating. Allied Market Research predicts the frozen pizza market – including pizzas with wheat crusts — will grow about 6% annually to hit $17 billion by 2023.
The appetite for gluten-free baked goods – which are also popular with people who don’t have celiac — also seems likely to stay hearty.
“Now you have people who might have had Lyme disease, or have degenerative arthritic conditions, diabetics, people who have been told by their physicians to try out a gluten-free diet,” Cain said. “It’s become kind of the first line of defense that doctors will recommend.”
And while she knows a capital infusion could help the company leap forward, she is not very interested in pursuing venture capital or a buyer. Against the Grain is going to stay in the family, said Cain, citing the example of close competitor Udi’s, which was bought and sold several times and is now owned by ConAgra.
“We never went into this looking to make money,” said Cain. “We went into this because we felt we had a product superior to everything out there.”
