Approximately seven miles west of Morrisville State College in the town of Nelson, a small facility has been cooking up big dreams.
For more than a decade, Nelson Farms, a small-scale, FDA-inspected food processing incubator operated by the auxiliary corporation of Morrisville, has helped form some 1,000 businesses and developed more than 600 food products by providing entrepreneurial agribusiness opportunities for a variety of clients.
Morrisville alumnus Stephen Nicolaos turned to Nelson Farms for help in getting a treasured family recipe to the market. A 33-year employee at Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station, Nicolaos ’82 and his family have operated the Stephen’s Greek Cuisine stand at the Great New York State Fair since 1985.
Nicolaos’ homemade salad dressing, made fresh daily like the rest of the menu, was such a hit with fairgoers that he decided to begin bottling it for retail in 2008. Although cautious at first, a meeting with the Nelson Farms staff immediately calmed his nerves.
“I was very nervous when the process started, with the materials needed, labels, bottles, ingredients, approval, etc., but there wasn’t a question the team at Nelson Farms could not answer. They made it very easy on me,” said Nicolaos, whose customers can now bring home a 12-ounce bottle of his “State Fair Greek Salad Dressing,” either from his stand right at the fair or the Nelson Farms booth at the Taste NY Marketplace.
Helping bring such products from idea to reality is Nelson Farms’ small-but-hardworking crew of four full-time and three part-time employees.
“Nobody has one specific job,” said Samantha Clark-Collins, associate director of Nelson Farms. “We have productions where all staff is needed to complete the job. We have a great group of flexible employees who support each other on a daily basis.”
The experienced team has a taste for success, especially product development manager and MSC alumna Amanda Hewitt, ’88, who receives ideas from entrepreneurs across the region. After determining if the product meets the facility’s criteria, Hewitt will request a small sample of the product or bring the client into the facility’s shared-use kitchen to make one.
As that process unfolds, the same thought always runs through Hewitt’s mind: how will the item translate to commercial production?
“I have to look ahead,” she explained. “I try to bring them from the way they do it at home to the way that it needs to be done commercially and still maintain the integrity of the product.”
That means it may take up to three attempts tinkering with the recipe before it meets the final approval of Hewitt and the client. Complete details of the new sample are then sent to Cornell Food Venture Center, where it’s ensured for safety and stability through lab analysis and Process Authority approval, which provides a Scheduled Process document detailing each of the recipe’s ingredients by weight per batch size.
Following these steps – usually six months from start to finish – the product is ready to enter the marketplace. But Hewitt, whose own batch of creative ideas have helped Nelson Farms produce more than 200 of its own products, knows the effort doesn’t end there.
“If you don’t market the product from that point on – and who loves your product more than you? Who’s going to market it better than you? – If you don’t do that, you don’t make it a success.”
That’s the value Morrisville students learn as well, as Nelson Farms also serves as an experimental laboratory providing real-world experience in marketing along with entrepreneurship, agritourism, nutrition, and value-added agriculture and development.
Hewitt annually assists with Morrisville’s Distribution and Marketing of Agricultural Products course, where students from a variety of programs are divided into groups and each come up with a product. They develop those ideas during the fall semester, before producing and marketing it throughout the spring semester.
“It’s a great way to develop hands-on experience in a real-life setting,” Clark-Collins said. “They don’t just talk about making a product; they actually produce it. If a product is successful, they can still see it being sold at our location and other stores across New York State for years to come.”
Like Nicolaos’ dressing, many of those products still line the shelves at the Nelson Farms Country Store, a specialty foods market and extension of the facility featuring the recipes made in its kitchen. And Hewitt feels a special connection to each of the people behind them.
“They are like family,” she said. “I’m helping the birth of their product. It’s very rewarding to see these things actually take flight. I have a great job.”
