Unique Products Help to Shape Kansas Agriculture
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The Kansas agriculture industry is far more diverse than strictly ranching and row crops. These local entrepreneurs are proof of that, adding value to their businesses with distinctive, Kansas-made products.
Morning Light Kombucha
Melinda Williamson discovered that functional foods – food products that may possess additional health benefits besides nutrition – like kombucha helped her to fight her autoimmune disease. Focusing on sustainability and reducing waste, she launched Morning Light Kombucha at farmers’ markets and small businesses that wanted to offer refill stations in 2016.
The fermented, carbonated tea contains probiotics, antioxidants and vitamins that support gut health and the immune system. Williamson says consuming just 4 to 8 ounces daily provides relief from digestive issues, acid reflux and inflammation. Out of around 100 flavors, 90% are sourced from local, organic farms.
“These unique partnerships allow us to offer seasonal flavors. If we get some ingredients in abundance, we’ll juice it and freeze it to use later,” says Williamson, who is a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation.
Williamson’s favorites are gooseberry and chokecherry, but flavors range from basil and honeysuckle to peaches and carrots. Her next venture adds a prepackaged, canned kombucha to the lineup. Customers can order and subscribe online for direct shipment to receive popular year-round flavors like strawberry and grape.
For more information, visit morninglightkombucha.com.
Wright Enterprises
Dennis Wright and his father grow about 800 acres of high-oleic acid sunflower seeds each year, part of which they process into cooking oil. They cold-press seeds using an expeller press to extract the oil, then filter and bottle the oil on the farm, resulting in a clean, natural, unrefined cooking oil.
“Typically, it’s not over a month old when it hits store shelves,” Wright says. “So we offer something that’s a very premium product at a pretty reasonable price because we can sustainably produce it ourselves.”
Wright compares the product to olive oil in the way consumers can use it for sauteing or drizzling over foods. It’s also popular for soap makers because it’s naturally high in vitamin E, which is good for the skin. The cooking oil is available direct, online and in stores.
For more information, visit wright.farm.
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Sticky Spoons
Making homemade jelly is somewhat of a lost art, but not for Debbie Gerard and Kris Sallee, who began Sticky Spoons in 1994. Twenty-five years of experience later, they offer over 20 flavors of jelly and eight varieties of quick bread mixes at crafts fairs and through online sales.
“We started out with fruits that were available to us locally – peaches and grapes and apples and strawberries,” Gerard says.
They also source ingredients from other states, like Michigan and Colorado. Gerard says their fans appreciate the simple homemade jellies “like Grandma used to make.” Sticky Spoons keeps it natural, never adding any artificial flavors. Customer favorites include Sandhill Plum, Apple Cinnamon and Fresh Peach.
For more information, visit stickyspoons.com.
Boot Hill Distillery
Dodge City’s Boot Hill was once a vagrant cemetery, but today the city welcomes a different breed of spirits there. In 2014, Sublette farmer Hayes Kelman bought the dilapidated building that once housed municipal offices and remodeled it into a distillery. In 2016, Kelman opened Boot Hill Distillery, offering a completely farm-to-bottle product.
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“We are with the seed from the beginning,” Kelman says. “We plant the grain, tend and care for it, and harvest it out of the field before turning it into whiskey. One of our favorite things that we like to tell people is that the spirits we produce are truly ‘soil to sip.’”
The distillery houses a tasting room for visitors to sample the whiskey – along with the popular bourbon they launched in 2019 – and distributes its beverages through establishments across Kansas. On the national level, the company partners with an online retail distributor to ship product to most states.
For more information, visit boothilldistillery.com.