On a trip to London, Allen Zak and his family believed they saw the future of food consumption.
After some daring decisions, they launched Zak Organics Food Co. in March of 2016 and are charting a bright future from their Moose Jaw-based food processing plant. Zak Organics offers four varieties of their organic crunchy pea snack food with new products coming out this summer.
“It’s been quite an adventure,” said Allen Zak, CEO of Zak Organics. “We’re getting some traction. People like our product and it’s in a snack area that people are increasingly looking for. It’s plant-based protein; it’s high protein; high fibre; rich in iron. It’s a healthy snack with much less salt and fat than traditional snacks.”
Zak is a fourth generation farmer with more than 6,000 acres near Fir Mountain. When he took over the family farm in 1997 he felt that there might be a better way to do it. He and his wife Marilyn and their sons Brody and Cole went to visit Zak’s brother in London where he worked and came away convinced to change their approach.
“While I was over there, we were in a lot of grocery stores and restaurants. Being in farming I’ve always been interested in food. Seeing how conscious Londoners and Englanders… were of their food and how big organic was there, how much more significant it was, I just realized that this is going to be the future. This is where we’re going. They’re just ahead of us,” Zak said.
“I came home and the next month I listed my sprayer with Ritchie Bros.”
It didn’t happen overnight, but the Zaks became a fully certified organic farm in 2010.
“I made the decision in my mind and we just went for it. At that time we were about 4,000 acres, so it was a pretty big decision and we’ve slowly grown the farm a little more,” Zak said. “It is a big learning curve, for sure. When you have chemical and other methods of fixing issues it’s a lot easier. When you’re organic I think you have to plan things out a little better. You need a little more patience and you need to work with Mother Nature. The more you learn about it, the better off you end up. We try to keep educating ourselves with better organic agronomy practices.”
Getting Started
If becoming an organic farmer is a risk, then deciding to double-down and become an organic food producer is something else entirely. Zak admits the idea was “a little crazy,” but he felt disconnected from his work by simply putting his organic produce on a truck and seeing it leave his farm.
“You never know where it goes or who the final consumer is. We felt a need to meet the people who are using our products,” he said. “At the same time we thought we could add value to what we produce.
“We started throwing around the idea of making a snack. We would go into some of these stores for snacks and our boys were young and there was nothing really there that they liked to eat that was healthy.
“We thought there must be a demand. People must want to snack healthier.”
Zak said he liked wasabi peas and I thought they could grow something similar. They began growing a lot of varieties and doing bake tests in a little roaster on their barbecue.
Zak went to the Saskatchewan Food Industry Development Centre in Saskatoon and after 10 months of work, trial-and-error and collaboration they had recipes and a production process in place. The company was incorporated in February of 2015 and came to market 13 months later.
“It’s crazy. I think any entrepreneur is a little crazy. You have to be. You have to be comfortable with uncertainty and prepared for lots of work with little initial reward,” Zak said. “Saying that, it’s definitely rewarding process. I’ve met so many unbelievably nice people and learned so much about the food business. It’s been well worth it.
“Growing a company is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but at the same time it helps you grow as a person.”
Products
Their crunchy peas come in four flavours: garden herb, salt & lime, smoky BBQ and mango habanero. Some restaurants have taken to using their snacks in place of crutons in salads.
“Our products all use real organic herbs and spices for flavouring and people like that taste. It’s not an artificial taste. If we say there is dill on our peas, you can actually see the dill. It’s real organic dill. You don’t get that with normal snacks and people have responded positively to that. We’re just going to keep listening to what the consumers are looking for,” Zak said. “That’s why we love doing farmer’s markets and trade shows and getting out and meeting our customers. Our last flavour, our mango habanero, has been really popular. That was actually a customer who kept taking me aside at a farmer’s market in Regina and said you have to make this flavour and finally to make her happy I said we’d try it. It took us about nine months to make it, but now I would say it’s just about our best flavour.”
Zak Organics crunchy peas are available at London Drugs and Bulk Barn nationally and are also available at Safeway/Sobeys and Overwaitea. They are also available in independent retailers and Zak said that Alternate Root Organics in Moose Jaw “sells a huge amount of our snacks.”
Future Plans
They started distributing in Saskatchewan initially and expanded west, but are now working on expanding further into Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. They are also testing the waters in Mexico and the United States.
“Early indications are that they like our product, but it will take a lot of planning and a lot of capital to expand into those markets. We’re just being cautious there at the moment,” he said.
Thousands of Moose Javians drive past the Zak Oragnics’ 7,500 sq. foot facility every day and most don’t know it. The building on Thatcher — across the street from the old Bonanza — was formerly the central office for the Prairie South School Division. Because it is an organic food processing facility, the public can’t just drop in, but Zak has a long-term vision for the space.
“When we renovated that building to turn it into our processing facility, we cordoned off about 550 feet and we have plans to make a Saskatchewan food products store,” Zak said. “We’re right on Thatcher and there’s just really terrific traffic going by our facility all day long. We want to have our peas featured there, of course, but we’ve met a lot of really neat Saskatchewan food companies too and we want to help them sell their products.”
That will take approvals from City Hall first and Zak said they are still in the design phase, but they’re excited about the future.
When he went to England, he saw people filling a need in the marketplace and he feels the need for healthy, tasty snacks is there in Canada.
“We’re just trying to listen to what our customers want and listen to them and help solve their problems,” he said. “A big problem is getting a nutritious, nut-free snack for kids in school that the kids will eat. The problem is that if they do find one or two they can’t put it in the lunch every day because the kid is sick of it by the end of the week. So they need a diverse variety of things to put into kid’s lunches, but it has to meet these requirements and the kids have to continue to like it.”
