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Happy Girl Kitchen Sparks a Movement

Matt Szymankowski

Cultures around the world have grown to appreciate ferments for their unique taste, food preservation qualities, nutrition and inebriation!

Preserving California’s Bounty

     You might say that Happy Girl Kitchen Co. started with a compost fight in a UC Santa Cruz trailer park. What began with two friends in their underwear having a refuse and water fight ended up as a family building a business and a community.
    “There was nothing we couldn’t do together if we could have a garden hose compost fight,” says Happy Girl co-owner Todd Champagne of his wife, Jordan. Today, the Champagnes have two children, a thriving business selling California’s preserved
bounty and teaching classes. They also are in the thick of a community and social movement centered on having high-quality local food year-round.
     It’s hard to define exactly what Happy Girl Kitchen does. Even Todd Champagne can’t ready do it. His best explanation incorporates the company’s logo – a jar. “The jar is the common denominator — if you can put it in a jar, we probably will,” Todd says. The company began in 2003 with jars of tomato products but has steadily expanded. Today Happy Girl fans can get the company’s spicy carrots, tomato juice, several kinds of pickles, dilly green beans, jams, jellies and lemonade at farmers market stands, in markets and online. Miso soup and beverages also may be in their future.
     The diversity of products is inspired by the Champagnes’ time working on and visiting farms in Europe. In Germany, Todd says, “We visited a farm stand from one small town. It had cheese, yogurt, sourdough, sour pickles, kraut, fresh grain products. It was f
a one-stop shop. That vision fueled our creative fire.” Stirred also by seeing how people preserved food, the Champagnes commenced canning tomatoes. Jordan recommends tomatoes as the place where home canners (and aspiring home canners) should start. “For Jordan, the quintessential example of talking ‘buy fresh, buy local’ is not missing the tomatoes now. How many jars of sauce do you open in the winter? Putting up our own tomatoes is a good place to start. Tomato sauce is something we’re not willing to live without.”
     But putting up a winter’s worth of Happy Girl tomatoes would be prohibitively expensive for most people. Understanding this, and wanting to help grow a healthy food community, the Champagnes launched canning classes last summer. This year, the classes will run almost year-round.
     On a foggy August Sunday in Oakland, seven people gather at a turquoise and green Victorian in the heart of the Temescal neighborhood. The home is owned by Robert Akeley, a retired psychiatrist, writer, painter and rose gardener. The garden also boasts fruit trees as old as the house and a very old barn stocked with jars of Happy Girl’s farmers market offerings. Arriving from as far away as Cupertino, the diverse group is here to learn about fermentation from Todd. Just down the street from the Temescal farmers market where Happy Girl now has a bustling stand, the house provides a space for the community Happy Girl is building around its reputation and its products.
     As the class begins, Todd hands out a packet of recipes and an info sheet of fermented foods. “Fermented foods are edible magic!” it reads. “Cultures around the world have grown to appreciate ferments for their unique taste, food preservation qualities, nutrition and inebriation! Folks were fermenting long before we cultivated the soil – it’s so easy!”
     The punctuation is enthusiastic because Todd is clearly into his craft. He gets giddy as he discusses the benefits and science of fermented foods. After the introduction, the group heads into the kitchen. The process of a Happy Girl class is anything but exact — there’s no one way to chop a cabbage, the students learn; there’s no single recipe for kimchi. Where other cooking classes, and indeed other boutique products, are rigorously homogenous, the Champagnes are pretty mellow about their process. “Jordan and I tease each other that we try to be very folksy. We appreciate food for the people. We’re approachable. The products are not affordable for everyone, so we entertain creative trades. We didn’t go to culinary school, but we are inspired to create a sustainable food system,” Todd says, before launching into a story about how he accidentally fermented some juice left in his car. He refrigerated it, drank it and pronounced it good.
     Teaching classes allows the Champagnes to reach beyond their market stands and influence the way people eat in a deeper way. “Group momentum is nice. People meet and form collectives and do projects together. It’s about community building, empowering people to do it themselves,” he says.
     Todd Gonzales is part of the Champagnes’ community. He joined Happy Girl Kitchen after looking into taking one class and discovering a community of passionate producers. Gonzales recalls how a meeting with Todd at the Ferry Plaza farmers market turned into a mutually beneficial work-trade arrangement. “We organized a kraut-a-thon with members of my class and put up 400 pounds of hand-cut kraut. In the course of organizing for that day, Todd, Jordan and I spoke more, often riffing on topics for an hour. From this conversation, a position was created for me with Happy Girl.”
     A class participant, self-described Happy Girl groupie Diane Ruddle, says she and her partner immediately put up gallons of tomatoes after she took her first class. For nonfarmers like Ruddle, the cost of all those tomatoes can be prohibitive. For that reason, the Champagnes recently launched the Preservation Society, a service where people who have taken Happy Girl classes can buy ripe, fresh fruit and vegetables in peak season at bulk prices from Monterey and Santa Cruz farms. The Preservation Society, Todd says, closes the loop that begins with outreach at farmers market and moves through delivering produce that enables people to follow through at home. The Champagnes hope to turn the Preservation Society into a nonprofit to serve a bigger community, one whose members consume the bounty of Happy Girl suppliers’ products.
     Happy Girl turns farming into an opportunity for friends to share good food while they become empowered. “It also feels like we’re building not only food security, but a secure community,” Todd says. “Having children makes us think about how to include other children and make this many dimensional ideal landscape for nourishing family life.” 

Do It Yourself

     Want to learn the time-honored art of putting up food or are you interested in just consuming the goods? Here are some local resources to help:
    Happy Girl Kitchen (happygirlkitchen.com) schedules seasonal classes in Oakland and Watsonville, provides resources for preserving food and sells preserved fruits, vegetables and other items.

     June Taylor Jams (junetaylorjams.com) offers hands-on classes in conserves and preserving fruit out of a Berkeley kitchen and sells gourmet jams.

     Blue Chair Fruit Company (bluechairfruit.com) sells jams, jellies and marmalades made in Alameda.

     Institute for Urban Homesteading (iuhoakland.com) teaches classes in preservation, fermentation, animal husbandry, herbal medicines and more.