Mainebiz

O N T H E R E C O R D W W W. M A I N E B I Z . B I Z 25 D E C E M B E R 1 4 , 2 0 1 5 B Y L O R I V A L I G R A T he idea for the homemade butter company started in 2012, when two of Casco Bay's co-owners, Jennell Carter and Alicia Menard, were visiting friend Sue Konkel, who gave them some bacon and blue cheese butter she had made with store-bought butter. ey loved it on turkey burgers, and started to look at what else to put it on. en they decided to create their own business. But fi rst, they had to learn how to make butter, a laborious, trial-and-error process. ey initially used KitchenAid mixers at the church. at led to buying their fi rst 15-gallon butter churn, called "Jerri," that allowed them to not have to hand-squeeze the butter. ey later bought fl oor mixers and a larger 65-gal- lon churn called "Ben" and in August 2014 moved to their current location in Scarborough, where they make up to 3,000 pounds of fl avored butter a month, mostly in 5.5-ounce containers, but some in one-pound logs for local restaurants. e company is self-funded. In an early foray into sales, they sold 54 packages of butter at the Kennebunk Farmers' Market, and knew they had a hit on their hands. ey brought on Andrew Menard, who still divides his time between Casco Bay and a wine distributor. Of the four owner-oper- ators, both Menards and Carter work full time (though they also have other full-time jobs). ey hope 2016 will be the year when they scale up enough to leave their other jobs and focus on the butter business. e Menards and Carter recently shared their cilantro lime, cinnamon sugar, cultured sea salt and other but- ters with Mainebiz at their factory, just days after returning from taste- tests at Fairway Market locations in New York City. ey also sell to 26 Hannaford and 22 Whole Foods stores, the latter of which they hope to expand to 38 in January. An edited transcript follows. Mainebiz: What distinguishes your butter? Jennell Carter: We try to keep our dairy sources as local as possible. We are organically certifi ed [in our factory]. But since Moo Milk went out of business there is no proces- sor for organic dairy in Maine. We're working with farmers and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association to try to rectify the situa- tion in Maine so small businesses can have organic cream. e company idea started when Sue fl avored store-bought butter with bacon and blue cheese. Alicia and I wanted to have some sort of food business, because it's a passion of ours. I read an article out of Wisconsin that predicted butter would follow suit with cheese, which is that 10 to 15 years ago you probably had one or two varieties of cheese in your refrigera- tor and now you have several. ey thought butter would be the same way, with multiple fl avors. MB: How are you organically certifi ed? Alicia Menard: We follow certain processes and are certifi ed by MOFGA. It's everything from the cleaning products we use to pest control and how we handle products and where we store the products. MB: Your butter is high priced. What is the competition? Andrew Menard: We don't really com- pete with Kate's Homemade Butter because they're national. en there is Kerrygold Irish butter, but we are better than them and we consider ourselves an artisanal product. We are a super-pre- mium product, priced at $6.50 to $7.50 for 5.5 ounces. But we use real Italian truffl es in our butter, for example. MB: You expect to become full-time in 2016 and expand. How so? Jennell Carter: We just started talk- ing with the lobster industry to co- brand butter with lobster and sea salt. And we see growth in areas outside grocery stores. P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY Casco Bay Butter owners, left to right: Alicia Menard, Sue Konkel, Andrew Menard and Jennell Carter. They are pictured in the company's 2,200-square-foot site in Scarborough. From its humble beginnings in the kitchen of the Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church in Portland to its current 2,200-square-foot factory in Scarborough, Casco Bay Butter is expanding regionally and into new markets, including potentially lobster-flavored butter. " " " Sometimes You Need to Break the Mold IT Solutions Designed for Your Business Managed Services Cloud/Virtualization Data Management Networking Security IT Consulting n n n n n n www.WGTECH.com 207.856.5300 " Need to Break the Mold

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