Eat'n Park, a Pennsylvania restaurant chain with more than 75 locations, found that nature is not the most reliable business partner when it decided to plan its menu based on locally grown produce.
While locally sourced food is a growing trend in many restaurants, Eat'n Park has been buying from area farmers for the past 12 years.
Brooks Broadhurst, the company's vice president in charge of food and beverage, said he had been wanting to get more fresh, locally grown food into Eat'n Park but finding fresh tomatoes in a timely fashion was hard.
Broadhurst held up the fresh tomato as almost the holy grail of area produce because there is no comparison between the flavor and texture of a vine-ripened tomato and a tomato that was picked too early and gassed to bring out the red.
While farmers in the region do grow tomatoes for retailers, they were too large for Eat'n Park, which needs baseball-size tomatoes that can be sliced and easily fit on a sandwich.
Don Brenkle, one of the third-generation owners of Brenkle's Farm, had always grown softball-size tomatoes, which sell better at the store where much of Brenkle's produce is sold.
Brenkle is now planting a slightly smaller variety of tomatoes for Eat'n Park. His family also invested in high tunnels, a sort of hoop greenhouse, to grow those tomatoes so they would come in earlier in the year.
In addition to sandwiches and burgers, the tomatoes will be used for the restaurant's chicken bruschetta, an herb-covered chicken breast covered with tomatoes and drizzled with balsamic vinegar.
However, a construction problem with the greenhouse this year killed the prospect of early tomatoes for Brenkle's farm, and the 50-degree nights and cooler days have meant that the tomatoes in the field have yet to ripen.
Nature also isn't cooperating with Eat'n Park's efforts to feature a pickled pepper steak sandwich made with a variety of sweet peppers called yummy peppers. The restaurant planned to buy locally grown peppers, which it would then pickle to put on the sandwich.
Now, because it has to wait for the peppers to ripen locally, the company is getting its peppers from California.
The problem down the road, Broadhurst said, is that the local peppers will still be coming in even after the steak sandwich comes off the seasonal menu Sept. 15. He said the restaurant will honor its pledge to buy the peppers, which will be included in salad bars.
For years, in a city surrounded by farms, Eat'n Park was confounded by the logistics of getting fresh food to its tables.
The missing piece between the farm and the table was the truck.
Brenkle could not get his produce to more than 70 restaurants, and the restaurant company did not have the trucks to go get the produce.
The link both sides needed was Paragon Foods, a food distribution service that already served Eat'n Park.
It used to be that farmers -- including Alfred Brenkle, the father of Don and Gary Brenkle who operate the 300-acre Butler County farm -- would drive their vegetables to the produce terminal in the Strip District and take whatever the middlemen would pay them.
Eat'n Park has been buying local produce from farmers since 2002, using Paragon to deliver the goods. The system allows for such quick delivery that the produce can go from the field to the restaurant kitchen in 12 hours.
Recently, Eat'n Park obtained cabbage for coleslaw and its Pittsburgh turkey sandwich from Yarnick's Farm in Indiana, Pa., Wexford Farms in Pine, Pa., and Wier's Farm in Willard, Ohio. Those farms, plus Brenkle's and Harvest Valley Farms in Valencia, Pa., also provided the restaurants with zucchini and yellow squash, cucumbers, banana peppers and jalapeno peppers.
John McClelland, chief operating officer of Paragon Foods, said now that there is a definite buyer for their goods, they get a better price.
Now, when the boxes come to Paragon in the Strip District packed for Eat'n Park, the trucking company can get the local produce into the supply stream.
"Inserting the local piece is seamless," McClelland said.
SundayMonday Business on 08/24/2014