WATERBURY, Vt. – By mid-October, the fall foliage season was nearly over, but the tour buses and out-of-state cars were still pulling in at the cluster of shops selling Cabot Cheese, Lake Champlain chocolates and other made-in-Vermont products.
The Vermont label “makes me think it’s a little more pure, a little more down-home,” Nancy Drake of Troy, Ohio, said as she left with a box of Maple Cream Cookies. “It’s a little different from what you can buy in the chain stores.”
Whether the product is an apple pie, beer or world-famous Vermont maple syrup, the Vermont name has long been prized as a marketing tool. Now the state is looking to protect it by cracking down on its use by companies that have little or no connection to the state.
“It’s an attempt, one, to be of assistance to consumers, to give them the means to know what they’re buying and, secondarily, to be supportive to those businesses that are located in Vermont or are using Vermont ingredients in their products,” said Attorney General William Sorrell, whose office drafted the new rules.
The rules extend only to foods, and apply only to companies doing business in the state.
Calls for a crackdown date back at least 15 years, to a case in which the attorney general’s office sued Vermont Maple Orchards Inc., an Essex Junction-based packer of maple syrup and honey and a subsidiary of New Jersey-based Borden Inc., for allegedly violating the state’s consumer fraud law.
The syrup and honey came from Canada, a fact disclosed only in the fine print on the back of the container, while the word “Vermont” was displayed prominently on the front. In a settlement, the company agreed to pay $150,000.
The Vermont name is widely regarded as something worth protecting.
“I think it represents wholesomeness,” said Dan Smith, a marketing professor at Indiana University. Vermont “is the land of wholesome living and bed and breakfasts.”
A survey by the Center for Rural Studies at the University of Vermont found that an association with the state could boost sales of a product 15 percent.
“The power of the Vermont name in terms of quality and authenticity is like gold in the marketplace,” David Barasch, a former Ben & Jerry’s executive who founded the Vermont Mystic Pie Co. in 2002.
The Vermont name has cachet even in neighboring New Hampshire. New Hampshire Agriculture Commissioner Steve Taylor noted that New Hampshire produces maple syrup, and yet out-of-staters come into his wife’s general store and ask for “Vermont maple syrup.”
“It’s carefully nurtured and goes back to the 1930s,” Taylor said of the Vermont brand. “It’s been pushed along and built very skillfully. I’ve got to hand it to them.”
One business to run afoul of the new Vermont rules is Harrington’s of Vermont, a 132-year-old company that cures and smokes hams, bacon and turkey.
At its plant in Richmond, Vt., the smokers are slowly fed with moistened sawdust and ground-up corn cobs. At the curing stations, workers use blowtorches to caramelize a glaze of maple syrup and spices on the hams. In other rooms, employees take mail orders and pack and ship the meat.
But the company buys its hams from the Midwest, since Vermont raises only about 1,500 pigs a year and Harrington’s would need 35,000 to 40,000 to meet demand. As a result, Harrington’s has been told that the slogan “Vermont Smoked Hams” must go, and a disclaimer noting that the meat comes from elsewhere must be included in ads, catalogs and packages.
During a legislative hearing, there was discussion over whether putting a hyphen between “Vermont” and “Smoked” would give consumers a clue that it was the smoking and curing – and not the pig-raising – that occurred in the Green Mountain State.
But the attorney general’s office said that any way you slice it, the ham cannot be advertised in a way that might mislead consumers.
RB Klinkenberg, chief operating officer at Harrington’s, said the company will comply, but he is not happy about it. “The tie to Vermont has always been part of our marketing,” he said. “It really seems unfair.”
Barasch said he has a lot of respect for the contribution Harrington’s has made to building the Vermont brand. But “they have an obligation to be honest, as we all do, about what it is and what it isn’t.”
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