Supporter Spotlight - First Field

A Better World Café is grateful for the support all the individuals and businesses that contribute their time and resources to help us keep to our mission alive to help make a sustainable world where all may eat. Every now and then we like to highlight one of these supporters and this week we’d like to focus on First Field, a business quickly becoming famous for their organic Jersey Ketchup. (Pictured: Arianna, intern and Theresa, owner)

Theresa Viggiano was renting a small Griggstown farmhouse and since there was quite a bit of land attached, she and her roommates decided to grow some tomatoes. During the summer of 2007, she and her now husband Patrick Leger had a bonus crop of tomatoes. With all of this extra bounty available, they decided to try their hand at making organic homemade ketchup by playing with Patrick’s Canadian family recipe and what they came up with is a sweet and spicy concoction with only a small bit of organic sugar, the rest of the sweetness coming from their fresh New Jersey tomatoes.

It wasn’t long before they went from selling their canned tomatoes and unique ketchup at their modest roadside stand to getting enough attention and demand for their product that they knew that they needed help expanding their enterprise and reached out to as many places as they could for space and assistance. According to Theresa, “We were selling the ketchup at our farm stand out of mason jars and at the Whole Earth Center in Princeton and realized with demand from a store, what do we do? We need a commercial kitchen! We started emailing everybody, asking schools, asking kitchens. Nobody had the space for us, nobody was willing. Then I sent an email to Lisanne at Elijah’s Promise who was absolutely, totally generous to let us use their kitchen and told us about the different programs at Elijah’s and we were around when Better World Café was getting started.”

In return for the kitchen space, Theresa and Patrick helped teach the students at Elijah’s Promise and in addition, hosted a public Farm to Table event held by Elijah’s Promise for the public to teach methods of canning and preserving foods which included tastings of applesauce and apple and apricot butters, Jersey Cocktail (First Field’s version of Bloody Mary Mix), and their popular ketchup. First Field has gone beyond tomato growing to include other organic produce. “For A Better World Café, we can grow a little bit more fun niche-y things that Elijah’s Promise would be less likely to use in their menu such as purple-green tomatillos and different kinds of eggplant” as seen just last week at their stand at the Rutgers Farmers Market.

As their business continues to flourish, they’ve partnered with other local growers and have now moved their production to a larger facility with the help of the Rutgers Food Innovation Center in Bridgeton. This USDA grant funded Center is a supporter of startup food companies that also believes in the ideals of local and sustainable agriculture and is also finding ways to help ways to bring local produce and preserved foods into New Jersey schools.

Yet even as First Field continues to grow, they still continue to help by continuing to supply us with donations of their wonderful organic produce to A Better World Café and also Elijah’s Promise. We appreciate everything that they’ve been able to do for us and wish them the best of success in everything they do.

(Blog post contributed by Diane, A Better World volunteer)