“Without a community, I would still be making pints,” Phil Hallstedt told the crowd gathered Tuesday morning at Red Truck Orchard’s new production facility in Northport, where the farm marked the installation of a high speed bottling line funded in part by a $100,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD).
The line is housed in a former pole barn that was converted into a yearround production facility that cuts the time it takes for two or three people to bottle about 2,000 bottles of cherry vinegar from two days to about four hours.
Former Bell’s Brewer brew master Sam Reese, now the director of operations at Red Truck, described the space as a “bit of a small utilitarian winery.” Three tanks, named after team member’s mothers and grandmothers, sit along the back wall behind the new bottling machine which stretches across the middle of the room.
Reese explained that vinegar takes two fermentations. The cherries are “blitzed” into a fine puree to draw the color and antioxidants from the skins, then fermented into wine with a proprietary yeast blend, based on a Hallstedt family recipe. The wine then moves into a second room, also full of tanks named after employee matriarchs, where a “mother,” which is a matrix of bacteria held together by cellulose, converts alcohol to acetic acid, the main component of vinegar. That stage takes a few weeks to a few months and includes aging over specially cut cherry wood shavings supplied by local business, Kabocha Woodworking.
Back in the main room, Matt Sutton, who handles packaging and logistics, said that before the line arrived, he, Reese and orchard manager Em Korte had to split up filling bottles one day and labeling the next.
“Everyone is too old for repetitive movements throughout the entire day,” he said.
Sutton, also a former brewer at Founders, described the new line as a hybrid between hand packaging and a fully automated system. A fully automated line would have filled up the entire space and then some, “so this is a sweet spot for us, both on the total overall labor draw and the consistency in that packaging,” he said, and added that the line is sized to match or slightly exceed the amount of vinegar the farm can make.
Workers load a case of empty glass at one end of the line, which rinses each bottle, fills it with a piston filler, caps it, applies body and neck labels and a date code, and sets them all up for packing at the other end. Overall, the line eliminates about 88% of the lifting, placing and repositioning that used to be done by hand.
Sutton’s goal is that the customer never thinks about the packaging. “We generally don’t even realize that something is packaged unless it’s the first time we’ve ever seen it, or it’s messed up,” he said.
The facility and bottling line was made possible by a value added grant from MDARD, which MDARD economic and community development specialist Jodi Gruner said is expected to triple Red Truck’s capacity.
“More production capacity, more innovative new products like this for cherries, gives our farmers more opportunities to be able to be part of that supply chain and get a sustainable price and not have to ship them to be processed,” she said.
Wendy Wieland of the MSU Extension Product Center, which has advised the Hallstedts from the start, said the farm’s path to vinegar ran through several reinventions. Those pivots earned Hallstedt Homestead Cherries the Product Center’s Barrier Buster Award in 2023. Wieland also praised the Hallstedts on their ability to read the market.
“Phil and Sarah correctly pegged, and this is not easy to do, that there was a convergence between the known attributes of cherries, as far as health benefits, and this quickly ratcheting up interest in gut health and gut flora, and how people can use functional food (such as the cherry vinegar) to work towards a healthier outcome,” she said.
However, that demand is running into a shortage of fruit. Hallstedt said the tart cherry industry produced about 85 million pounds this year against the roughly 180 million pounds of domestic demand.
“There’s demand, but no inventory,” he said. “We’ve taken our fruit and put it aside and bought into the future so that we can have sufficient fruit to build this product and expand it.”
All the cherries used in the vinegar right now come from the Hallstedt’s farm along with some leased trees. As the business grows, Hallstedt said that they plan to buy from other growers at “a level that is sustainable for them.”
Both Sarah and Phil spent much of their remarks thanking the “Homestead Hero” volunteers, tradespeople and organizations, from electricians to excavators, for helping turn the barn into the production facility.
“You are the heart of our communities,” he said. “It’s because of the efforts of people here, it’s because of the expertise of this team here that we’re even capable of doing what we are hoping to do - which at the first goal is to save this farm. We hope to save other farms as well, but the first goal is to save this one.”
