Tags: Healthy Food and Drinks, Truly Pinoy Food and Drinks, Vegetarian and Organic Food
By KC Santos
TARLAC CITY, TARLAC – Rowena Follosco Sotero knows that in order for her organic products to be appealing to consumers, she had to make it more familiar to Filipino taste buds.
In 2009, she started Good Earth and started promoting and selling organic products. Summer in her hometown means an abundance of tomatoes. There was too much harvest that most of it ends up being thrown away in sidewalks.
Rowena took advantage of this and sourced tomatoes directly from the farmers. From these she made an interesting twist to the usual bland tomato sauce.
“Who doesn’t like tuyo (dried fish)? I figured tuyo and tomatoes are eaten together anyway so why not combine them in one bottle to make a sauce that’s palatable to most Filipinos,” Rowena says.
She also soon started tending her own organic farm and to improve the product’s flavor, Rowena adds imported ingredients like capers and other spices.
Riding on the success of her Tomato and Tuyo Sauce, Rowena started making other unique products like the vinegar made from papayas, bananas, and tomatoes. She even sells unique malunggay and basil pesto ideal as bread topping or mixed in sauces of pasta dishes.
Rowena says her products are organic, even the pesticides used in the plants are made from natural ingredients. She says people have varied tastes and diets and that “localizing” the concept of organic food makes it easier for her to deliver her message to a larger market.
“Organic food is really hard to promote. People have to realize that it takes an immense load of work to tend and grow organic produce. They should acknowledge that before distancing away since it pretty much tastes way better than chemically-produced food,” she says.
To expand her advocacy further, Rowena also runs a restaurant in Tarlac where she cooks and serves 100-percent organically produced food from the livestock to the vegetables.
She constantly participates in trade fairs in Tarlac and Manila to introduce her products further. Prices of her products range from P40 to P200. She also sells packed dried organic herbs alongside her processed products.
Rowena says she is working her way to expanding her food business so that everyone will get the chance to try not just healthy but actually great-tasting food selections.
Get more information about Good Earth
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