Two foraging-focused Haines businesses, Adventure Harvest and Spruce & Birch Acres, are among 12 finalists for the 2021 Path to Prosperity award, a funding and training opportunity to help grow sustainable businesses across Southeast Alaska.
The annual award competition is hosted by Spruce Root, a Juneau-based community development nonprofit. This year it was open only to start-ups and businesses that derive a significant portion of income from tourism.
The contest aims to push entrepreneurs “to build up their local economy, improve the environment, and educate visitors responsibly about Southeast Alaska,” said Izzy Haywood, the program administrator.
At Adventure Harvest, owners Tawny Darling and Robert Chadwell turn locally foraged ingredients — rose petals, spruce tips, berries, boletes, and more — into jellies, syrups and spice mixes. They sell their products, including what might be the world’s first spruce-tip lemon curd, at the Haines Farmer’s Market and the Salt and Soil Marketplace.
“There’s a pretty finite amount of business we can do [right now],” Chadwell said, because without a commercial kitchen he and Darling are limited, by state and federal law, in what foods they can sell. “We’d like to start our own retail store.”
The Path to Prosperity award — which includes an infusion of $25,000 and a year of advising from Spruce Root business coaches — would help Darling and Chadwell broaden their range of products and expand sales across Haines and Southeast Alaska.
Spruce & Birch owner Cindy Zuluaga Jimenez is planning to build an interactive trail around her farm to educate visitors about how to identify and harvest edible wild plants. “The boreal forest is literally a smorgasbord of wild and delicious food. It’s a forager’s dream,” Jimenez said.
Her interactive 0.70-mile loop trail, which has yet to be built, will lead visitors along a variety of edibles, including currants, huckleberries, salmonberries, wild greens, mushrooms and devil’s club. Jimenez hopes “a sensory experience…where you can touch the plants, taste the plants and really learn to identify wild edibles” will create a “more informed tourism base.”
As part of a national trend, Jimenez, Chadwell and Darling started their companies during the pandemic. Across the country, 2020 saw a 24 percent spike in start-ups—the largest yearly increase on record, according to a study published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
As tourism in Haines ebbed last year, Darling, Chadwell and Jimenez used their free time to imagine ways of engaging future visitors. “Covid changed everything,” Chadwell said.
In September, the Path to Prosperity finalists will participate in a three-day “boot camp,” as Spruce Root calls it, to receive one-on-one coaching and advice for crafting business plans, which finalists will submit to judges in December.
As it evaluates health guidelines, Spruce Root is yet to determine whether the boot camp will be held virtually or in-person. In the past, finalists gathered for the weekend in Juneau.
Judges will evaluate the candidates’ businesses plans for feasibility, sustainability and social impact and will announce two winners in February 2022.
Four Haines businesses have won the award since the first competition in 2012: Port Chilkoot Distillery and Fairweather Ski Works in 2014; Mud Bay Lumber in 2018; and Foundroot in 2019. Over eight years, 291 businesses and start-ups across Southeast have applied for the award, and 17 have won a total of $560,000.
Darling and Chadwell said they didn’t know Jimenez had applied for the award until the list of finalists was announced on July 8. “Why haven’t we been doing this together?!” Darling said she joked when she saw Cindy after the announcement.
No matter what happens with the competition, Darling, Chadwell and Jimenez are planning to go on foraging “playdates” and pondering other ways to collaborate.