Ten years ago, Cori Deans was warned by physicians that she might be dependent on medication for the remainder of her life, and would have to treat her Crohn’s disease by means of diet and lifestyle. In defiance, she looked to food to improve her health and in doing so created a booming business across the East Coast.
Small Town Cultures, a firm dedicated to creating small batch fermented foods, began with Deans gaining knowledge of her own gut. “I was advised to stick to a diet low in fiber, as well as a blend of immunosuppressant drugs plus antibiotics and steroids, but nothing seemed to work or made sense to me.”
She then began to examine her condition, and came across a book titled Patient Heal Thyself, which suggested a distinct method. After shifting her diet to nutrient-rich whole foods and healthy fats, eating a selection of fermented products (ranging from containers of sauerkraut to bottles of kombucha), and removing as much stress from her lifestyle as possible, she soon noticed improvement.
“I realized that many autoimmune diseases may be caused by the fact that we’re eating dead food,” she says from her home in the Adirondacks. “Plus our vegetables are coming from soils that are dead, which doesn’t help, because they’re lacking in the good bacteria. Fermented foods, however, are the opposite of that. They’re full of life.”
Within a few months, Deans saw her health issues vanish. She now enjoys the ability to consume whatever she desires, and she is still an enthusiast of fermented foods. When she was informed of the health-filled bacteria of edibles such as sauerkraut, she started creating it herself. “Most of the commercially available products have been pasteurized, so that means you’re not reaping the full benefits,” she commented.
To discover a more efficient way of utilizing her weekly veg box from a local CSA, Dean began experimenting. She found the jars of fermented veg to be beneficial to her own health, yet consuming the large amounts of food alone was becoming a burden. This motivated Dean to start sharing the veg with family and friends, and when they gave positive feedback she decided to take the next step in 2017, launching a small side business while continuing her career as a full-time massage therapist.
Before long, her jars of fermentation found their way to a local food distributor heading to Cedar Run, a boutique market near her home in Keene, New York. He liked it, and it wasn’t long before she was featured in a dozen stores.
Since Deans had never handled a team or ran a business before, she has been learning as she goes. “I had to go from taking care of everything by myself to managing a whole team,” she comments.
The clear glass jars filled with green beans, purple cabbage, carrots, and more started popping up on more shelves, pushing her to seek out a larger facility for production and reevaluating her product line.
“Since it’s no longer feasible to use wild ingredients due to quantity issues, I’ve switched to staple crops grown near upstate New York. Everything in the jars except lemons comes from local ecosystems.” She emphasizes the importance of not using foods that have traveled long distances or been treated with preservatives as these would have no living bacteria, which is key for gut health. Hydroponic veggies, on the other hand, are of no use for fermentation as they’ve had no contact with soil or the beneficial microbes living there.
Small Town Cultures, founded by Deans, currently has a presence in 400 stores and employs 10 people. This is set to expand further, with the company poised to feature in 40 additional Whole Foods outlets. In order to realize this growth, Deans has raised $1 million in angel funding.
Deans is passionate about ensuring that food systems foster human wellbeing, and even if somebody is not suffering from a chronic ailment, her business allows for the revival of an ancient dietary practice. She believes that, with just a small amount of these fermented foods, many people can experience health benefits, citing her own experience of being free from her symptoms in a matter of months.