thelocaldiner.com

Helenans are celebrating the opening of their second health foods market, the StrawHouse Market. Its building is both a technological marvel and a work of art. We first noticed it going up last year, when stacks of Gallatin Valley straw started to form walls in a field among new housing developments off of North Montana. In its finished state, solar panels and less conspicuous efficiency features complement its colorful adobe/prairie-style exterior. Here’s how its website, which contains an impressive collection of architectural and engineering detail, puts it:

The synergistic integration of interdependent energy saving systems incorporated as well, set the building apart from the norm.

1. Passive solar gain through fenestration at the south elevation to admit and retain solar heat to the interior.
2. Grid-tied photovoltaic power generation to offset utility supplied electricity and help to manage peak electrical load requirements and used as shading for the passive solar fenestrations during the summer months.
3. Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) technology for heating, cooling, and ergonomics.
4. On site rain/snow capture, harvest and storage for landscape irrigation requirements.
5. Permeable customer parking area in place of paving and Ashlar (recycled) concrete paving substituted for monolithic concrete patio areas allowing vegetation growth significantly reducing the Heat Island affect on site and at building perimeter resulting in increased comfort and decreased energy requirements for cooling during summer months.

You can tell that its proprietor, Dirk Ellis, has a background in mechanical engineering. Oh, and that last “permeable customer parking area” item means that you park your car on a grass boulevard that drains into a recycled water irrigation system. (I can’t help but wonder how that will fare in the next spring storm, or under the snowplow next winter.)

Inside, the StrawHouse is much smaller that it appears (blame it on the bale-thick walls), and features less than half the selection of its uptown competitor the Real Food Store. And while customers might not miss Real Food’s score of bulk granola varieties, other omissions such as tiny sprouts, chile pepper, and cheese assortments put the StrawHouse somewhere between an elegant organic convenience store and a full-fledged health food supermarket. Valley residents would find that even the inorganic gas station Bob’s
Valley Market, down Montana on Lincoln Rd., boasts more shelf space (no solar panels, but great hams).

The smaller selection still has potential. While I have not yet tested their butcher, the StrawHouse expands our local selection of grass-fed Montana beef by offering cuts from Beaverhead Meats in Dillon, adding to Real Food’s McAlpine Ranch meats from Valier. And many Real Food fans frustrated by its teetotaling management hope that Ellis will seriously consider selling Montana and organic beer and wine.

The StrawHouse shines in pure design and comfort. Its welcoming two-story cafe, with deep-hued walls and warm wood flooring, is the kind of place you could spend a morning with the paper or meet for lunch, and a major improvement on Real Food’s utilitarian food court. And its deli wrap menu, ranging from portabello to roast pork, is more inspired than its rival’s wheat-bread and luncheon meat sandwiches.

My only serious complaint about the StrawHouse is its location amid the sprawling cul-de-sacs of North Montana Avenue. I have no problem with that in itself–suburbanites deserve natural foods too–but the big box store neighborhood is incongruous with all of its other conservation efforts. Real Foods is a little less central in its current location, but still walkable; the StrawHouse is within walking distance of the aforementioned cul-de-sacs, Shopko, and little else. Your average in-town Helenan will burn an extra pint of gas to drive past Real Foods (Van’s, Safeway, and County Market too) to get to the StrawHouse’s environmentally correct grass parking spaces and back; I’m no engineer, but my back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that it would take only a dozen-or-so customers driving those extra few miles to burn the same amount of energy all those photo-voltaic cells generate in a day (53 kWh, 180,000 BTUs, or 1.5 gallons of gas).

Given Ellis’s attention to detail, I suspect he considered the importance of location, and land costs and zoning restrictions drove him to North Montana. (Maybe the next new grocer will be more geographically efficient.) That aside, Ellis deserves credit for building Helena’s most architecturally and technologically intriguing new business.

StrawHouse Market
1050 Road Runner St
Helena, MT 59601
(406) 457-1050

We try to steer clear of Wal-Mart for shopping we could otherwise do at local grocery, but sometimes a roadtrip demands a store for both extra truck cupholders and industrial quantities of snackfoods. As we walked down skylit grocery aisles wide enough to drive through, we discovered that Wal-Mart not only had pretzel kegs and every variety of Easy Cheese, but also had localized its inventory to a surprising extent.

First we found Tim’s Cascade potato chips, acclaimed as the finest chip in the land, including a limited edition wasabi flavor. As it turns out, Tim’s is now owned by Birdseye, so maybe this wasn’t a surprise. Just across the aisle there stood two self-serve flour mills filled with Wheat Montana grain, something I noted last year but had not yet seen. They even sold flats of Montana’s Treasure bottled water, tucked away between Dasani and Arrowhead. But all of these things are available elsewhere–you could find them at most gas stations without a long walk from the parking lot.

The real value of Wal-Mart’s food store was finding foods you just can’t get anywhere else in Helena, unfortunately. They had the sweet-garlic Vietnamese hot sauce Sriracha, for example, something we usually had to get at an Asian seafood market in Bozeman. And tucked near a 35-cent avocado display were industrial-sized bags of ancho chiles, dried yet still supple, a key ingredient for mole that I previously could get only by mail order.

Helena’s due for another local grocery, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that they’ll have the hot stuff I need. But until then, I reluctantly must admit that the best specialty food store in town is the Wal-Mart.

Lauren Etter and Janet Adamy report ($) in the Journal about the morel rush now happening along the Whitefish Range west of the divide. A fascinating local market develops around the wild crop, with impromptu buyers popping up along roadsides to pay the pickers who roam last year’s wildfire burns in search of the fungal delicacy. There’s plenty of incentive:

Pickers here are selling a pound of fresh morels for about $3.50, which is low, they say. Wholesalers are selling fresh morels for as little as $8 a pound, not quite half last year’s going price. . . .

Cooks love morels, which have a spongelike appearance, because of their nutty taste and extraordinary ability to soak up sauces. A pound of morels sells for as much as $40 at fancy food stores like Dean & DeLuca in New York.

On the production end, the forest service charges $100 for a season harvesting permit and $500 for a buying permit in National Forests (commercial harvesting is banned in wilderness areas and Glacier National Park). For those prices and the cost of a tent to live in, one picker-buyer profiled in the Journal article said he could earn $800 a day all season, but he also faces high theft rates and vigilantism by armed pickers protecting “their” territory. It’s no place to raise a family, but he does: his wife and three young children share the tent.

Our foodie friend Jen posts about supporting local agriculture. Helena’s local food partisans shop at the Real Food Store, which recently won organic certification from the Montana Department of Agriculture.

Helena is lucky to have such a large locally-owned market as the Real Food Store, organic or not. With few exceptions, it features some of the best of Montana-made foods, from Willy D’s Sweet Hot Mustard to McAlpine Ranch Pork. Real Foods boasts a wall of nearly one hundred different spices in bulk (including several strengths of chili powder and curry), and the best sausage selection I’ve seen anywhere: from chorizo to merguez to bratwurst to hot italian turkey sausage (which we ate last night), their butcher has a way with the spice rack and meat grinder. These cheese selection at Real Foods beats Safeway and Albertson’s. Their deli and hot food bar serves up organic turkey sandwiches and shepard’s pie, as well as pizzas baked on nutty whole wheat crusts. And, true to their base constituency, they peddle a couple dozen granolas by bulk.

All that, combined with long business hours and prices that often meet the national chains (and beat them during their regular and widespread sales), proves that a home-grown grocery store like Real Foods can not just keep up with the big boys, but thrive.

Wheat Montana, a vertically integrated seed-to-sandwich grain operation based in Three Forks, is a “Buy Montana” success story. We always stop there on drives between Helena and Bozeman for a sweet roll or sandwich and to top off the gas tank, then drive past the fields that fed us along Highway 287. Their bread selection has something for everyone: Multi-Grain, High Fiber, Low Carb, and even No Wheat.

James Larcombe reports in the Tribune that the proprietors, the Folkvord family, shared some of the secrets of their success in Great Falls recently. One of the secrets is distribution and marketing through mega-corporations:

Wheat Montana is working on a deal that could bring Starbucks products to its retail deli operations. A trial run in a Kalispell operation boosted sales by 40 percent, Folkvord said.

The small Montana company also has found success in working with Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer. In fact, about 40 percent of the company’s bread sales take place in Wal-Mart.

“They actually found us,” Folkvord said. “They are always interested in regional products.”

The Three Forks man traveled to Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to make a presentation to corporate officials. The meeting went well, with Wal-Mart simply asking Wheat Montana to price its products as low as possible.

“These guys welcomed us in, without any slotting fees or upfront money,” Folkvord said, noting the Wheat Montana’s allotment of space on Wal-Mart shelves has grown. “They’ve been very easy for us to deal with.”

Wheat Montana also learned the value of lean operations and reducing overhead from Wal-Mart. Controlling costs helped the company weather a significant sales slowdown in 2001, which came after a boom in flour sales apparently driven by Y2K millennium concerns.

I would rather see Wheat Montana partnering with homegrown businesses, selling Montana Maid coffee and distributing bread through the Real Food Store. But love them or hate them, a small business can learn a lot from Starbucks and Wal-Mart. If some of that discipline and know-how helps Wheat Montana grow profits and jobs here, then is a deal with these corporate devils really so bad? We’ll see.