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Seapoint Sells Target on Soybean Offerings

Seapoint Sells Target on Soybean Offerings

By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO

Huntington Beach-based Seapoint Farms Inc. recently sold Target Corp. on soy.

The company, which sells the Asian green vegetable “edamame,” or soybeans, got a call from Minneapolis-based Target six months ago asking for soy.

Now Seapoint is supplying more than 100 SuperTarget stores across the country, according to Seapoint cofounder Laura Cross. SuperTarget stores sell groceries along with other items.

“When it goes into Middle America like this, it’s becoming popular,” Cross said of soybeans. “It’s not just a fad.”

Laura and her husband, Kevin, started Seapoint Farms from their house in 1996. Monrovia-based Trader Joe’s Co., which sells an eclectic mix of natural foods, was their first customer.

Today, Seapoint has 68 distributors and 23 brokers around the U.S. and Canada that ship their products to about 6,000 stores. Among them are supermarkets such as Ralphs, Albertsons and Safeway, as well as Whole Foods Markets and Costco in the Midwest.

Seapoint still does private label products for Trader Joe’s.

The company is starting to make inroads into hospitals; universities, such as USC and the University of California, Los Angeles; and school districts, such as Tustin’s.

Seapoint sells five different bags of soybeans, with and without the pod, plus veggie blends and rice bowls.

The company targets a small but hot niche.

“In Japan they eat (edamame) like peanuts at bars,” Kevin Cross said. “As we brought it here, it was a unique item. It was healthy, and it was soy. Everyone wanted soy.”

The company’s 2002 sales were in the $10 million to $20 million range, Kevin Cross said. And it expects to see a 25% to 30% increase this year, he said.

Seapoint imports edamame from China and stores it in freezer warehouses in Los Angeles and New Jersey for its distributors. The company’s rice bowls are packaged in the U.S.

The natural food business is nothing new for the Crosses.

The two owned and ran Los Angeles-based Stonecrest Natural Foods, a natural foods distributor bought by Brea-based Nature’s Best in 1999.

Seapoint now sells its edamame through Nature’s Best.

But as the popularity of soy has grown, so has Seapoint’s competition.

“There’s always competition out there,” Kevin Cross said. “There’s a lot of Asian distributors that sell the product.”

Still, there’s a lot of work to do to get on consumers’ radars. Laura Cross said the biggest challenge is educating shoppers about edamame.

“There are a lot of markets where we’re in the health food section, which limits our exposure,” she said. “We’re trying to sell it as a vegetable, not a health food.”

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