Fort Kent, Maine sits at the top of the country, four and a half hours north of Winslow and a few miles from the Canadian border. The landscape is mountainous, the winters long, and the Bouchard family has been farming the same land there for six generations. For most of those generations, buckwheat was a side hustle — grown, milled on equipment passed down from the early 1900s, and sold in modest volumes locally. “The past 45 years, we’ve been at a very snail pace growth,” said Philip Bouchard, the sixth generation on the farm, who works alongside his father Joe. “This has always been a side hustle for our family.”
That changed when Karen Getz found them.
Getz was an award-winning cheesemaker in Waterville, Maine, with a gluten intolerance and a problem: no cracker on the market was good enough to serve alongside her cheese. In 2015, she started baking her own cracker in her kitchen. They were unlike anything available in the store, thin-sliced, twice-baked buckwheat crisps with cranberries, almonds, wild blueberries, and a dash of local honey. Maine law allows home cooks to launch food businesses from their kitchens, and Getz took advantage. Farmers markets led to local stores, local stores to Hannaford supermarkets, Hannaford supermarkets to Whole Foods across New England. When she needed more buckwheat flour, she found the Bouchards.
In their 18,000-square-foot bakery in Winslow, an employee assembles boxes of Maine Crisp Company’s Better Buckwheat Cranberry Almond crackers.
Today the Maine Crisp Company operates out of an 18,000-square-foot bakery in Winslow, employs 35 people, and sells in Whole Foods stores nationwide and in Amazon’s store. Lewis Goldstein, who joined as CEO three and a half years ago, said the company’s mission remains unchanged from when Karen was at the helm. Their job is “to produce nutritious and delicious buckwheat-based snacks while providing good jobs to our local community and supporting Maine agriculture.”
As Maine Crisp has grown, so has the Bouchard farm. Buckwheat volume has climbed from roughly 18,000 pounds a year to close to 400,000 pounds, and the Bouchards have expanded beyond their own acreage, partnering with neighboring potato farmers who grow buckwheat as a regenerative cover crop — a rotation that replenishes soil nutrients while generating income in off years. A federal grant funded a new mill to keep pace with demand. “In our expansion with Maine Crisp, we have also expanded in our local farming community, with other farms, utilizing some of their land and their rotation, which is a win-win for both parties,” Philip said. “Between Maine Crisp and Amazon,” he said, “that will solidify keeping the farm available for the seventh generation.”
Winslow sits in Kennebec County, a former paper mill town where old brick buildings along the river are still being slowly repurposed. It is not a logistics hub. For years, Maine Crisp fulfilled every online order from the bakery, which meant inconsistent delivery windows and broken crisps on doorsteps. “When we were doing the fulfillment ourselves, people would receive it in two days, five days, seven days. It wasn’t consistent,” said Goldstein. “To offer the consumer the best experience, we knew we had to be in the Fulfillment by Amazon program.”
With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), Maine Crisp ships product in bulk to Amazon’s fulfillment network; customers across the country receive it in one or two days, Amazon handles the picking, packing, returns and customer service. Goldstein had worried Amazon’s handling wouldn’t match his team’s care. The opposite proved true. “The fulfillment of our crackers across the country has been so much better doing it through Amazon than when we would send it through other carriers,” he said. “We switched to Fulfilled by Amazon, and we haven’t looked back since.”
Boxes of Maine Crisp Company’s Savory Fig and Thyme crackers roll off the assembly, before being shipped to Amazon’s FBA program.
They’re using Amazon’s virtual bundles feature, which replaced hand-assembled variety packs, letting customers mix and match flavors and quantities without anyone at the bakery building a custom box. A+ Content and their Brand Store carry the company’s story directly to shoppers. “Our store on Amazon communicates what we’re all about, educates about buckwheat, teaches people about how Karen started this company, teaches people about where we’re from and what that means to our community, and teaches people about where we source our products and why that’s important to us,” Goldstein said. Subscribe & Save enrollment grows month over month. Amazon is now about 10 percent of revenue, with Goldstein expecting to more than triple that share in the coming year following a tenfold increase the year before.
Every box sold means more buckwheat from the Bouchards, more acres planted in Aroostook County, more neighboring farmers earning income on their cover crop rotation, and more shifts in Winslow. “Amazon has been an essential spoke in our wheel as we grow the business,” Goldstein said, “because of its ability to have us be available to so many people in so many parts of the country.” When Goldstein joined, Maine Crisp employed 13 people. It now employs 35, with healthcare, a 401(k), and regular donations to a food bank two doors down. “Giving back is part of being a good company, a good person, a good brand,” he said.
Karen Getz started this company because she couldn’t find a good cracker. “Building Maine Crisp in this town of 3,500,” Goldstein said, “means that we are defying the odds — proving that a woman can create something in her kitchen in Maine and then it can grow into a national brand, still being made in rural Maine.”