A chocolatier this week emphasized that if you search long enough for suppliers you’ll find what you need, without going through brokers.
On assignment, I spent a while this morning looking for a source of a certain organic agricultural product, for which I wanted a direct source, or at least a wholesale distributor working directly with farms.
I tried:
- Local Harvest (which probably would work well for certain categories)
- Of course a bunch of net searches, including search engines other than Google
About to post a question in the LinkedIn Food Production Professionals group, I decided to check one last place: A company whose product is composed largely of this ingredient.
Bingo. Their site had a link to their growers. The page about the growers had a link to a national association. Of course the national association has all the info I need about suppliers.
Lesson learned: There’s an association for nearly every product under the sun (what an apt expression). Including Christmas Trees.
That’s probably the quickest shortcut to find that which you seek, only second to asking someone you know who may be sourcing what you’re looking for.
People are often willing to share and be of help to a beloved supplier by getting them another customer.
Any other tricks for finding great ingredients?
Let’s see if I ask: Know a source of frozen Gravenstein apples?
