AVANT GARDENER
News of farmers dumping tons of unsellable tomatoes by the roadside due to oversupply has been an unfortunate reality for many years.
Now, a canning company is doing something about it.
Tosen Foods Inc. (TFI) is a canned goods manufacturer whose products are household names in the Visayas. The company has been in operation for close to 70 years. It ventured into canned goods manufacturing 21 years ago when it began to can sardines under the brands Senorita and Swan, then vegetables like peas, corn, and garbanzos under the brand Mayon three to four years after. They try to purchase locally when possible, even to this day, when it’s easier to import ingredients.
“We source from local farms in Bulacan, Pampanga, and Quezon to produce our sweet whole corn kernel and our cream-style corn,” says company president and third generation agribusiness owner Candice Chung.
As folks who need a steady supply of ingredients know, working with local farmers can be challenging. The country is continually beset by typhoons, which could wipe out a crop, and ever fluctuating farmgate prices means that there’s always a danger of pole vaulting, the industry term for when farmers renege on their previous agreements with buyers so they can sell their produce elsewhere at a higher price. TFI prevents this by canning seasonally, when harvests are bountiful and cultivating good relationships with the coops they work with.
“We respect their way of farming. They tell us… when they can produce in bulk… because we… want to be able to make sure that our farmer partners are also able to earn. We even go to the extent of telling them if they’re able to sell your produce to others at better prices during certain seasons, by all means, go. We want to step in when there are gaps in the system, when there’s an opportunity, and when they have overflow…,” Chung said. “...we take great pride in saying that once the corn is picked, it’s canned within the same day because that’s the way we make sure we keep it as fresh and as a strong corn flavor as possible.”
This arrangement means TFI gets their needed supply of corn and their partner farmers earn from produce that would normally end up as waste.
“You’re talking about a yield of between 40-50,000 ears at any one time in the harvest. If they don’t know where to go, a lot of them end up leaving their corn in the field or they give it for free to their neighbors or community,” Chung explained. “We want to be able to give them that security in that if you plant and you do it well, we will be there to take your goods from you and you don’t have to worry about where you’re going to bring it.”
TFI is the only company that cans local corn. It currently sources corn from three coops made up of about 20-30 farmers each, and there are plans to work with a fourth. “Our oldest partners have been with us for more than 10 years, and we want to hopefully celebrate the 15th and 20th year with them,” Chung said.
TFI recently added canned whole peeled tomatoes to their portfolio. “We are the first local canners of whole peeled tomatoes,” Chung said. “We saw two years ago that farmers were dumping their surplus tomatoes because they couldn’t find buyers during peak harvest season… And for us as food manufacturers, that’s painful. Food is food.”
Canning is a great way to preserve vegetables. “The beauty of canning technology is that once you clean and pack it properly and can it properly, it can last for years. Sometimes the flavors even further develop once it's canned.”
TFI sources their tomatoes from Ifugao, meeting their farmer partners through WOFEX’s social enterprise arm. “The reason why we started with Ifugao [was because] the DA of Cordillera was also the most responsive.”
They can four varieties: Diamante, Avatar, Garnet, Braveheart. “We pay above market rate. We want to make sure that we give the farmers their due so that they continue planting,” Chung said. “We negotiate upfront what the price will be during peak harvest season, because the prices in the bagsakan change daily.”
R&D was interesting, because it’s something that’s never been done locally before. Local tomatoes are sweeter and have a higher water content than the imported varieties used in canning. They also use different machinery.
“We didn’t want to force farmers to plant a variety that they weren’t used to. Our role was to take what was there and value-add, not teach them to plant something that they don’t,” Chung said. “[We] ended up with a very unique product because the tomatoes are sweeter, the end product also ended up being sweeter, which ends up matching Filipino profile.”
There are plans to go into canned local fruit next, another way for farmers to make money off something that would have gone to waste.
“We want to be able to promote local manufacturing…. There’s a big opportunity for post-process harvesting for manufacturers like myself to be able to support local farmers… There’s still a stigma that imported is better and that’s part of the reason why we continuously try to push and source locally where we can,” Chung said. “We’re not a huge company but we want to make it a point that nobody dumps.”