When the National Academy of Sciences reported in the last year that children’s health may suffer more than adults’ from the pesticides they routinely swallow with their fruits and vegetables, Bob Scaman’s business got a healthy shot in the arm. Scaman is the 26-year-old president and founder of Goodness Greenness, Chicago’s major organic produce broker. “The health food customer has always wanted organic produce,” he says. “But when reports like that one come out, you get a new group of mainstream families shopping for this stuff.” And that means conventional grocery stores goose their supply of organic produce. He’s not out tipping over pesticide trucks, but Scaman says he counts on “each new food scare to put our produce on more people’s lists.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It’s now on quite a few. The son of two wholesalers of conventional produce, Scaman started Goodness Greenness two and a half years ago, and it’s now a $10 million-a-year business. “That’s big for an organic company, but for conventional produce it’s nothing,” he says.
Scaman says the organic farm community in Wisconsin is way ahead of the one in Illinois, largely because of the leadership of a 20-year-old organic dairy co-op that got the ball rolling up there. But everything is relative; according to Dave Engel of the Wisconsin chapter of the Organic Crop Improvement Association, just one dairy farm per thousand is organic. Engel, whose farm is part of a co-op that sells to Chicago-area stores via Goodness Greenness, says consumer demand is so good these days that both the egg and dairy groups will double their co-op membership within the next year. “Farmers are definitely turning because of the demand,” Engel says. “A lot of them have been sitting on the fence until they could see if people really wanted these things. Now they see it’s a good way to go.”
