In 2015, Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets secured $25,000 from a federal furnish to help fund an alternate undertaking to Japan. Leaders of eight small food manufacturers and a few authorities personnel headed to Tokyo for four days in October 2016. The purpose is to drum up a new enterprise in an international market. So, some years later, have the ones agencies made sales to Japan?
VPR’s Did It Work? Series seems at a sampling of publicly-funded tasks in Vermont of the past numerous years. More from the collection here. Pretty a lot every yr the nation of Vermont gets some funding from the federal authorities, known as the Specialty Crop Block Grant. The Agency then spreads that cash round to unique entities to bolster individual plants, including maple syrup, fruit, and berries. In 2015, Chelsea Bardot Lewis, then the head of business improvement at the Agency, led an effort to relaxed $25,000 of that supply to marketplace Vermont forte foods in Japan. Why Japan?
Bardot Lewis said the concept got here from some maple manufacturers in Vermont. It seems Japan consumes plenty of maple syrup. “So Japan being the 1/3-largest marketplace for maple syrup within the global, we started out talking about what we should do in Japan,” Bardot Lewis said. “Certainly, there’s a willingness to spend many of the Japanese patrons usually for a beautiful, pure product. However, there wasn’t numerous cognizance approximately Vermont — and the Canadians have honestly beat us to the worldwide market. There is a tale that if it’s not Canadian maple syrup, then it’s fake.
