Adding value to radicchio so you can grow and sell more

In recent years fall has become synonymous with radicchio season. Farmers are posting pictures of their radicchio crops all over instagram and organizations are promoting this newly-popular crop in events termed Chickory Week (#chicoryweek).

Like many farmers, I started experimenting with small plots of radicchio after reading Josh Volk’s first article in Growing For Market. Since then, I am fully on the radicchio bandwagon. I think of chicory as a ‘farmer’s crop’, so to speak- it's so beautiful and simple to grow with little disease, but it can be hard to sell in quantity. The wildness and unpredictability of some seed lots also offers something of a gamble. It’s the kind of gambling a grower could get addicted to, with some plants being totally different and others being so intricately beautiful you want to take an artist’s easel to the field right away. 

Despite my new found love of growing radicchio I must admit the flavor itself is still growing on me. I eat lots of radicchio because I love beautiful food with vibrant color and texture, but I sometimes struggle to convince market shoppers of its equally amazing flavor. Diligent local food shoppers ask lots of questions about radicchio on my display, which I love. But only folks who have grown up using it, or have acquired the taste for bitter are gravitating towards whole heads of Chiogga, Castelfranco and Treviso. 

Yet, surprisingly, most Americans have enjoyed eating radicchio in ready made spring mixes and bagged salads from grocery chains, they just may not have realized it.  The opportunity I saw was to try to start training customers to enjoy chicory by blending it into my bagged salad mixes. I developed two products to add to my market and wholesale offerings which allow me to grow as much radicchio as I please while also finding a good sales outlet for it. 

The first product I created is called “Everything Mix” which features a full spectrum of all the greens available on the farm in a given week of the year. One week it may contain a combination of lettuce, spinach, frisee, castelfranco, claytonia and edible flowers and the next week it may be slightly different depending on what is harvest-ready. I make sure to list each specific ingredient on the label for the customer. This mix is a great offering for market shoppers looking for an easy choice for indecisive shoppers or those who can't use up a whole bag of each type of greens in a week. My hope is that they will get familiar with the colors, textures and flavors of the chicory in this mix and learn to appreciate it, and know it by name. It is an undeniably beautiful mix which kind of feels similar to sneaking beets into a chocolate cake

I don’t mind being a little sneaky, while also serving up customer service in the form of convenience, and education to my community. In addition to the ‘Everything Mix’ I also package up something I call the ‘Farm Chick Mix’ which is a play on the word Chicory and an allusion to myself as the farm chick who grew it! The Farm Chick mix is a blend of Chiogga Radicchio (I like Indigo & Leonardo Varieties), Castelfranco (Bel Fiore variety), and Frisee (Benefine is my favorite for its fine incised leaves). When combined they make a fine blend of color, texture and have lots of bounce which helps get them extra dry in the greens spinner, and look full and generous in the bag at market. This product mostly sells to those who are already acquainted with radicchio and perhaps have the Salad Lyonnaise recipe in their kitchen repertoire. It also attracts newcomers to the chicory scene with an ‘easy to grab, easy to store, easy to add to any dish’ option. I add serving suggestions to the label for this item to encourage experimentation. 

If this sounds like an interesting option for your farm, there are some legal and growing parameters to be aware of. First, the legal. The FD&C Act, section 201(r) states: The term “raw agricultural commodity” (“RAC” means any food in its raw or natural state, including all fruits that are washed, colored, or otherwise treated in their unpeeled natural form prior to marketing. This category of RACs is the category that includes most salad mixes grown on farms. It also includes radicchio, for example, a head cut from the plant, and with just the damaged outer leaves removed, is a RAC. Once you cut it in half or start to slice or chop, it is no longer defined as a RAC, and is subject to regulation as a manufactured food. Such regulations include guidelines for labelling, handling, and storing. It is important to be on the right side of this rule to protect your farm business. For my business and my customers, I knew I wanted to ‘slice and chop’ my radicchio before adding it to a mix. To do so I acquired a Virginia Home Processing Kitchen License (Issued by the Virginia Department of Ag and Consumer Services for $40/year + compliance with regulatory outlines), and got my “recipe and product information file” approved to do so. However, if you chose to use larger whole leaves or cut higher on the plant to make the pieces smaller and bite size, you could potentially get around the regulatory hurdle here. 

In my opinion, the key to making a chicory that is great in a mix is growing it to maturity before harvest. By doing so you have a range of blanched hearts and colorful exterior leaves that make a dynamic mix with a great shelf life that just isn’t possible with baby leaf or direct seeded chicory. 

To grow out a bed of chicory I seed 128 cell trays in the greenhouse a month before transplanting into the field and space my plants 12’’ apart in rows 9’’ apart, mostly because this is a standard I set across many crop types on my farm. For frisee, I plant even tighter (6’’ in row) to encourage them to ‘self blanch’ as much as possible by getting snug with their neighbors, but also have used rubber bands to aid this as well. For Chiogga and Castelfranco types I plant in both spring and fall, and for Frisee I replant all season with a new succession started in the greenhouse each month beginning at the end of February and finishing at the end of August. 

When it is time to harvest, I tend to cut the most uniform, large heads below the growing point for selling whole (as a RAC if you remember your acronym!) at $3 per head. Anything small, abnormal, or in excess of my anticipated sales gets harvested above the growing point for going into mixes. My pricing for a half pound bag of salad mix is $5, which grosses an additional $2 worth of value to each half pound head of radicchio. Of course, extra handling, labelling and kitchen certification are additional direct and overhead costs that diminish that value add slightly. For my operation, this is enough cushion to cover those extra costs and still come out ahead. 

In addition, I have found that both radicchio and frisee offer many opportunities to ‘cut and come again’ when you harvest above the growing point. Sometimes even forming a smaller scale tightly formed head, and other times providing a more open leaf structure to the re-growth. Unlike a second cutting on lettuce, you don't have to worry about the second cutting of chicory being ‘too bitter’ since that already comes with the territory. 

If you are like me and you have fallen in love with growing radicchio but haven’t found a good market for it, perhaps this is one way to train your customer base and continue growing these beautiful crops. By doing so you may create a value added product for your market, and you may also add value to your own life as well.