The Rise of Organics
Part I: An interview with Arnie Koss, Founder of Earth’s Best Baby Food and Pioneer of the Organic Foods Industry
By Kate Simota Young
The Beginning of Earth’s Best Baby Food
Traveling through the agricultural lands of rural California, twin brothers Arnie and Ron Koss, who would become the founders of Earth’s Best Baby Food, were appalled.
- Ron and Arnie, 1972 (Courtesy of Arnold Koss, www.theearthsbeststory.com)
Rather than being captivated by bucolic landscapes, the brothers saw crop dusters flying over fields, spraying pesticides and herbicides on the cultivated land. Farm workers toiled among the crops as the poison fell from above. “Both of us had just read Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring. And, at the time, traces of pesticides and herbicides were being found in breast milk,” Arnie Koss explains. “It was a real shocker to see agricultural chemicals sprayed on crops, let alone with farmworkers in the fields. It was disturbing.”At the time, the brothers were 27 and traveling around California with no particular plan, or so it seemed. With fervor, Arnie and Ron brainstormed. “We thought, what can we do to have an effect on this chemical, agricultural reality,” Koss recalls. Though no one knew it at the time, the Koss Twin’s trip to California gave direction to the, at the time, slow-moving organic agriculture and food movement. “’What about organic baby food?’, we thought. Then, the conversation ended because, how do you start a baby food company? That was for someone else, not us.”
- Arnie Koss making a broom, 1983 (Courtsey of Arnold Koss, www.theearthsbeststory.com)
The idea lingered in the brothers’ minds until 1984. At the time, Arnie Koss was running Koss Brother Brooms, a Shaker-style, broom-making business. “One day, I was making a broom in my broom cocoon on my porch in Vermont. At that moment, it crystallized. It was time to stop talking, and time to attempt to start what would turn out to be the nation’s first organic baby food company.”
Without the prestigious pedigree of Ivy League MBAs, the brothers set out to launch the country’s first organic baby food company, Earth’s Best Baby Food. “The reason we picked baby food was that we realized that if there is any time that a parent will be predisposed to spend more money, that is when a child is an infant. Ron and I didn’t have kids at the time, but we thought that maybe people would spend more for their babies.”
There was a time when the Koss Twins considered farming, but in their minds, they wanted to make a grander difference in organics. “If organic baby food could manifest, it would create significant changes. It would change farming. It would change the marketplace. We were thinking big, and being a farmer wasn’t big enough. To be clear, I’m not for a second putting [farming] down. The agricultural scene is one of my favorite places to be. I’ve had the privilege of visiting many organic farms across the United States and became fast friends with many of the people involved. But that wasn’t the calling.”
Earth’s Best Influence on Organic Farming and Food Production Policy
In 1984, when Earth’s Best was developing as a company, there were no national standards for organic growers or organic food producers. “California had the CCOF, California Certified Organic Farmers, but beyond that organic was just the wild west. You could claim anything was organic,” Koss says. “We realized early on that if we were going to create the first organic baby food company in the U.S., our ingredients need to be certified. We needed third party certification. That’s how we became a part of the team that developed the organic standards and certification processes for the industry.”
The Koss twins are two of the founding members of the OCA, Organic Crops Improvement Association, and of OFPNA, Organic Foods Production Association of North America, which is now the OTA, the trade organization for the entire organic foods industry. They were working hard to bring credibility to the organic foods industry, a segment of food production that many Americans, at the time, couldn’t take seriously.
“Some people involved in developing the standards wanted a one year standard for transition, meaning that if there was someone who was farming conventionally, they could take their field out of rotation for a year, then the following year they could be certified,” Koss said. “We were not for that. We favored a three-year standard, which was more controversial. We thought a three-year standard was a genuine commitment to organic. Fortunately, the standards Ron and I were fighting for prevailed.”
The result of their quest for organic regulations and certifications became the Organic Food Act of 1990. “It was a defining moment for the entire organic food industry. There was now a national standard. It changed everything,” Koss notes.
With certifiers like OCIA, the Oregon Tilth and the QAI, Quality Assurance International, the brothers were able to piece together their certifications to become the first certified organic food product to be nationally distributed in the United States. “We also went a step further and had the produce we bought analytically tested for pesticide and herbicide residue, which became a standard for the industry. That was our commitment to organic.”
The Fate of Earth’s Best
While the twin’s had good intentions, they had little capital and found themselves entering the business world with venture capitalist and haughty CEOs who eventually eradicated the Koss Brothers from their company. In 1996, Earth’s Best Baby Food was bought by Heinz. While many would think the Koss brothers would hold resentment because of the falling out, Arnie is proud of the company’s impact on organics and how Earth’s Best was able to lift the industry out of obscurity. “That’s the sweetness of the whole story: We don’t have to wait around for other people to change the world.”
Arnie is currently working on his next venture, Brio Ice Cream. Brio has been in the making for ten years, and it isn’t a run-of- the-mill ice cream loaded with cream and sugar. Brio is made from all natural ingredients and fortified with vitamins and minerals. “You can eat it for breakfast,” Koss exclaims. All ingredients are responsibly sourced; the milk used is from Organic Valley. You can learn more about Brio here: http://briolovesyouback.com/
You can read also read all about the Koss Twin’s venture in their book, Earth’s Best Story: A Bittersweet Tale About Twin Brother’s Who Sparked an Organic Revolution. http://theearthsbeststory.com/
SOIL & Hearth 