Yes, He Cans
Millard Long has made it his business to put a lid on Kentucky’s surplus produce.
By Lisa Murtha
Illustration by Tara Hardy
Coming up the gravel drive of Millard Long’s Burlington, Kentucky, farm, there’s an unexpected scent—a fragrance I can’t quite place. It’s not the honeysuckles that line the road, or the blooming locust trees, either. No, this is savory and a bit spicy. Kind of like...barbecue sauce.
I fight off a craving for ribs and greet Long, founder and president of KHI Foods. A charming Mississippi drawl belies his non-native status as he leads me into KHI’s 5,000-square foot facility, winding through a maze of shelves, pallets, and boxes, all brimming with jars of soup, sauce, and salsa. Finally we come to a small knot of workers in hair nets huddled over two enormous steam kettles. One of the kettles contains the barbecue sauce I’ve been smelling; the other, marinara. It’s the marinara that’s the main attraction at KHI today. Long’s wife, Monica, leads the crew in opening cans of tomato paste and handing them over to Dino DiStasi, owner of Gabby’s Café in Wyoming and KHI’s client du jour.
The operation is very hands-on. Long—tall and balding and dressed in a chef’s smock that is impossibly white in spite of the sputtering spaghetti sauce—supervises the three-person KHI staff, while DiStasi hovers over the kettle like a proud parent.
DiStasi is already a successful restaurateur and marketer—you can buy his ready-made lasagna at Country Fresh Markets in Hartwell and Anderson Township—but the feather in his chef’s cap today rests in the kettle of sauce before him. It’s his first official commercial-sized batch. The aim? To sell DiStasi’s marinara right alongside jars of Ragu and Prego on your neighborhood grocer’s shelf. The challenge? “Going from five gallons in a restaurant to 100 gallons here,” says DiStasi.
KHI is helping him get there. Long’s company is a “boutique food manufacturer,” which means that KHI processes and bottles specialty foods. When a chef or a restaurant wants to market a product commercially, Long’s staff works with them not simply to bottle the item, but to ensure that the taste and the quality of the product aren’t lost in translation. Long opened KHI in 1997, offering a facility that’s a (very) scaled-down version of what you’d expect to see run by Kraft or Campbell’s—though he’s quick to point out, “we’ll never be a Kraft or a Campbell’s.” His expertise is working with small-batch food producers to help them bring their best to market.
Along the way Long has also developed a passion for helping local farmers keep their efforts from going to waste. He’s become the champion of malformed tomatoes and overabundant fields, enabling farmers to profit from what used to be their loss. His gleaming jars of tomato pulp are the inspired products of a man who bottles locally and thinks globally. But Long turns sheepish when the talk takes such grand, locavore-ish terms. “I just want to make a bunch and sell it,” he says.
Long didn’t come in to the boutique food processing business on a whim; in fact, he has an illustrious past in food packaging and manufacturing. In 1987, while working for Perdue Chicken, he earned the DuPont Package of the Year award for Innovation by designing the “controlled atmosphere container” that allowed Perdue to sell table-ready pre-cooked poultry. In 1988, John Morel Meats lured him to Cincinnati to continue his career in meat packaging. The new location stuck, but not the job. By the mid-1990s, after stints with food giant Sara Lee and candy-maker Van Melle, Long decided he was “burned out on corporate life” and quit it altogether.
He’d always been interested in beekeeping; he’d even received a hive as a gift from his daughter Katelyn. So he put his energy into that. In 1995, he partnered with Williamstown’s resident apiarist, Hubert “Honeybee” Martin, who taught him the ropes, and by Martin’s death in 2000, Long’s business, aptly named Katelyn’s Honey, was well on its way to becoming the top local honey supplier in Greater Cincinnati.
The building that now houses KHI Foods was erected to process and store his honey. But two years of weather problems—a drought in 2001 and incessant rain in 2002—depleted his bee population and all but destroyed the business. Bobbing and weaving, he started a line of apple butter and syrups named after his second daughter, Lizzy, but the business outlook was still bleak. “I was sitting out here with nothing to do,” he recalls.
The idle time led to a brainstorm. After visiting a local farm and seeing a load of tomatoes headed for the compost bin, Long asked why were they being tossed; they looked fine to him. The farmer explained that they were fine—just not perfect. “If the tomatoes have any kind of blemish—scars, growth stripes—the grocery store won’t take them,” Long says. They wouldn’t sell at farmers’ markets, either, so they became compost.
“I wouldn’t fit into the category of being a tree-hugger,” says Long, “but it hurts you to see farmers throwing this stuff away.” So he asked for a batch of the “ugly” tomatoes. Back at home, he threw them in to an old fish cooker and whipped up some homemade salsa, bottling it with his honey-handling equipment. After all, he reasoned, imperfections didn’t matter in salsa.
The salsa was a hit; demand grew quickly as local farmers bought it from him and re-sold it on their farm stands. Soon, Long’s salsa sales were surpassing honey sales by a landslide. He bought a five-gallon steam kettle from a junkyard for $30, started making bigger batches, and the family business was reborn as KHI (Katelyn’s Honey Incorporated) Foods.
Working closely with a program called Kentucky Proud, the “buy local” initiative of the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, Long scouted for growers with excess produce that he could purchase and process for salsa, barbecue sauce, and other tomato-based products. He realized that the bigger his business got, the more he could help Kentucky farmers. “As a company,” Long notes, “we’re uniquely positioned to buy local.” The farmers, in turn, would have additional income without any marketing or sales efforts on their parts. They would also be able to move away from growing tobacco, a mainstay crop for generations.
Back at KHI’s red outbuilding, the five-gallon steam kettle made way for 40-gallon, and then 100-gallon, kettles. With the promise of increased capacity, new clients began to pour in—restaurants eager to introduce their special recipes to the retail market; local specialty food companies that wanted to produce signature products; nonprofits looking for custom food items for fund-raising. An enormous, industrial-strength fruit and vegetable peeler took over the building’s back corner, and a spot was cleared in Long’s office for a label printer. Storage shelves filled with honey were soon eclipsed by bottles of salsa, marinara sauce, barbeque sauce, hot sauce, and chili.
Today, Long’s client list reads like a who’s who of local food businesses, from chic Daveed’s restaurant to hometown favorite Dixie Chili. Working with Ale-8-One, KHI produces apple butter and strawberry jam flavored with the soft drink. Long bottles sauces for Oriental Wok and Pompilio’s, and his honey-apple salsa is the house brand at Remke markets. Because of KHI, a number of hometown food purveyors have been able to test the retail waters with minimal risk. “It’s exciting to know that, as a little guy,” says Gabby’s owner DiStasi, “we can really come out with something and see what the reaction is from the consumer.”
Long wholeheartedly agrees. In 2008, riding the wave of locavore enthusiasm, he purchased eight truckloads of tomatoes from area farmers and saw over $1 million in sales. “Sustainability,” he quips, “does not have to be unprofitable.” Still, he makes a point of keeping his operation small, local, and—literally—hands-on. When Long and his three-person staff need help to custom-label and package jars of Kosher Rosh Hashanah honey each year (groups sell it for fund-raising), he works with clients at Northkey—a community mental health agency in Carrollton. “It’s a nice project,” says Northkey’s site supervisor, Joe Burdsall. “It has things in it that everybody can do...and of course they get paid, which means a lot to them. He’s really good to folks here.”
In 2008, Long paired with nutritionist Helene Gruber, a cancer survivor and director of nutrition services at St. Elizabeth Hospital, to develop the Comfort Care line of foods—highly fortified soups for people undergoing or recovering from cancer treatment. “It was a year-long evolution of trying to refine the product and help get the right taste,” Gruber explains. KHI worked with food scientists at Erlanger-based Wild Flavors as well as inpatient and outpatient focus groups to develop the final line of soups. “I’m just kind of the idea person,” Gruber says. “Millard is the guy who took the idea and ran with it. He helped us see that vision become reality.”
Long is proud to play a role in what some might see as an ironic agricultural adjustment. “Now,” he says, “the farmers in Kentucky, who for years grew tobacco that caused so much misery, are growing tomatoes for our soups for cancer patients.”
I ask Long about organic products, and he shrugs. KHI was certified to bottle organic produce, he says, but the company dropped the effort because demand was so low. His vision for the future rests much closer to home. “I think ‘local’ will replace [organic],” he says. He’s getting ready with a major expansion—building a 15,000-square-foot facility in Owenton. The additional plant will have four 350-gallon kettles. It’s a far cry from the fish cooker Long started with less than a decade ago.
Projects on the burner are mostly top secret, but Long hints at the possibility of a few large, long-term food service clients who could keep the tomato farmers of the Ohio River Valley very busy. He’s also exploring the possibility of sharing some of his “locally grown” marketing expertise with an Indiana farmer who produces Wagyu beef—the expensive, heavily-marbled meat that’s the darling of gourmet diners.
No matter how far KHI’s reach extends, Long makes it clear that he’ll be bringing his friends, the Kentucky farmers, along for the ride. “I want to get into processing more produce,” he says. He’s exploring what he can do with more harvest from the Bluegrass State—pumpkins, squash, green beans, apples, pears, and more. The reason, he says, is simple: “For us to come in and process tomatoes has given the farmers in Kentucky a fighting chance.”
Originally published in the August 2010 issue.