Petaluma, where I tried without success to find the picturesque farmstead, with its red barn, cornfield, and farmhouse, depicted on the package in which the organic roasting chicken I bought at Whole Foods had been wrapped; nor could I find Rosie herself, at least not outdoors, ranging freely.
When its founder, Allen Shainsky, recognized the threat from integrated national chicken processors like Tyson and Perdue, he decided that the only way to stay in business was through niche marketing. So he started processing, on different days of the week, chickens for the kosher, Asian, natural, and organic markets. Each required a slightly different protocol: to process a kosher bird you needed a rabbi on hand, for example; for an Asian bird you left the head and feet on; for the natural market you sold the same bird minus head and feet, but played up the fact that Rocky, as this product was called, received no antibiotics or animal by-products in its feed, and you provided a little exercise yard outside the shed so Rocky could, at his option, range free. And to call a bird organic, you followed the natural protocol except that you also fed it certified organic feed (corn and soy grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizer) and you processed the bird slightly younger and smaller, so it wouldn’t seem quite so expensive. Philosophy didn’t really enter into it.
