Founder Arlo Litman shows off his Solfruit dried tropical food packets at a Bridgehead coffee shop at Bank and Gilmour.
A Centretown man has parlayed his love of Colombia into a socially-conscious importing business that helps small-scale farmers access a reliable market for their dried fruit.
Arlo Litman says the idea to start Solfruit occurred to him in 2005 while visiting a farm in northern Colombia’s Paso del Mango region.
The area is known for its abundant produce.
But Litman says when fruit is in season, it floods the market and farmers have a hard time making a buck.
“We’re obviously not going to start shipping fresh fruits to Canada or the United States, but what if we were to dry the fruit and put it in funky little packages and bingo, these farmers have a market for their fruit,” says the 32-year-old entrepreneur who works by day as a constitutional lawyer for the Department of Justice.
Solfruit comes in five varieties — banana, mango, pineapple, physalis (golden berry) and a medley of all four.
It is currently sold at nine Bridgehead coffeehouses in Ottawa, as well as through the company’s catalogue and Solfruit’s website.
“It’s one of the best-tasting dried fruits out there,” says Gina Becker, the marketing manager for Bridgehead.
Unlike most products sold at Bridgehead, Solfruit is not fair trade or certified organic.
But Becker says the company’s on-the-ground partnerships and social responsibility model are in good alignment with the rest of the Bridgehead product line.
“They’ve been very thoughtful about how they’ve created Solfruit,” she says. “It’s been slow and steady and I think that’s one of their strengths.”
Litman says he’d like to see Solfruit expand into other markets beyond Ottawa.
However, he wants the growth to be sustainable and remain focused on helping people in Colombia.
“We have a vision that we’re really committed to,” he says.
“We’re doing business in a way very few people do and I think we can create a really successful business not based on the traditional Western capitalist model, but based on more a collaborative, community-based model.”
The drying, processing and packaging of the fruit are done in a small facility in Medellin, a city in northwest Colombia.
Litman takes care of the Canadian side, wading through the necessary paperwork to become a registered importer and fulfilling the Health Canada regulations in order for the product to have a nutritional information table printed on the packaging.
Profits are shared equally.
Teddy Samy, an economist and professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, says Solfruit is a win-win situation for producers in Colombia.
The arrangement gives them market access and a profit-sharing agreement.
“This new concept allows more of the gains to be brought back to the farmers,” he says.
“What would have happened if this did not exist? What would these farmers have had?”
Canada and Colombia are not new trading partners. Two-way merchandise trade between the countries totaled $1.1 billion in 2007, according to the Department of International Trade, and that number could grow once parliament signs off on the free trade agreement the pair inked last fall.