Carly Dougherty Provides Locally Sourced Fermented Goods

F&F Crew and Mural
Food and Ferments
Carly and Dave Dougherty (on the left) and the Food & Ferments staff in front of the new agricultural mural painted on the front of their warehouse this year in Cortland, New York.

By David Durrett – a current intern at GreenStar Food Co+op, David Durrrett is a lifelong resident of Ithaca as well as a graduate of Ithaca College. He is a freelance reporter whose work has also appeared in Tompkins Weekly and The Ithaca Voice, among other publications. 

Try Food and Ferments line of fermented foods and health tonics at our Cascadilla St., December 10, 10 AM – 2 PM!

For the past seven years, Carly Dougherty’s Food and Ferments has been providing fermented food to the Ithaca area.

In 2012, Dougherty and her husband Dave established their business in Philadelphia, launching at a farmer’s market. In 2014, they relocated to central New York, next to Dougherty’s family farm, and have a kitchen space in downtown Cortland, which they share with Main Street Farms.

“We always were interested in making something that we felt was good for people,” Dougherty said.

Food and Ferments sells naturally fermented products of various kinds. This includes food such as sauerkraut and kimchi, as well as tonics and probiotic drinks. In addition to selling their products at GreenStar and local farmers markets, Food and Ferments also sells its wares online.

While Food and Ferments is a “mom and pop” business, it also employs five part-time employees apart from the Doughertys, which Dougherty said makes them the largest vegetable fermentation company in Tompkins and Cortland counties. Because of the production schedule, Dougherty finds it most efficient to hire a crew of three to five people to work three days a week, but she hopes to eventually hire a full time employee for outreach and sales.

F&F Crew in Kitchen
The Doughertys and their staff in the kitchen at Food & Ferments in Cortland, New York.

“There’s just a lot of satisfaction in providing an enjoyable work environment for our employees to work in,” Dougherty said. “You feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself. It’s not just Dave and I; we have other people working for us that have fresh ideas, that have passion and energy about Food and Ferments as well, and so that all just contributes to making our products that much better.”

Dougherty, who is the majority owner in Food and Ferments, mainly has female employees. She said women-owned businesses are a rarity in agriculture.

“A lot of agriculture has been kind of a male-based industry for a long time, and it feels really good to be able to bring the women-owned aspect into our business as well,” Dougherty said.

According to Dougherty, part of the challenge of being a local business owner is “keeping all the plates spinning,” as well as continuing to evolve one’s business to stay competitive. She said that she used to get upset and discouraged when problems arose, but has come to accept those problems as part of running a business.

“You have to wear so many hats as a small business owner,” Dougherty said, “and always keep learning new things as the business evolves, as the marketplace changes. I think everyday evolution is part of the job description.”

F&F Crew Line-up in Field
The staff at Food & Ferments onsite at Main Street Farms in Cortland, NY. Carly & Dave Dougherty (in the back of line), have owned and operated the business since 2013.

Food and Ferments purchases its ingredients, such as green beans, cucumbers and Napa cabbage, the latter of which is well suited to make kimchi, from Stick and Stone Farms and Plowbreak Farms. Apart from GreenStar, Dougherty sells her products at the Ithaca Farmers Market

“Building our local food system  is something that’s really important to us,” Dougherty said. “We have no intention of wanting to be any kind of a national brand, we just want to be a strong, local, regional brand, and those local retailers are integral to that. They know our products, they know our customers, they’re the face of us on the retail level, where the customers are finding our products.“

Dougherty is especially grateful to GreenStar for selling Food and Ferments’ products, as well as for supporting her.

“They’ve really been supportive from the beginning,” Dougherty said. “We’ll keep growing each year but definitely we’ll never forget the stores that were willing to take us on when we were really small, and GreenStar was one of those, so I just appreciate how they’ve supported us from the beginning.”

The COVID-19 pandemic did not affect Food and Ferments as much as other local businesses, apart from forcing the employees to observe safety protocols and leading to more online and local sales. Dougherty credits this to how essential food is, and said that in some ways,  Food and Ferments benefited from the pandemic due to people realizing the importance of getting food locally.

“It was nice to see people returning to cooking at home and eating well and thinking about where their food came from,” Dougherty said. “I think the benefit of COVID was that people realized how important local food systems are, and I hope that’s something that carries forward.”

Dougherty enjoys seeing people eat her products, such as when children eat kimchi and when people buy pickles on a stick at the Farmer Market and eat them while walking away.

“It just never gets old seeing your products out in the world and people loving them,” Dougherty said