Our Promise
By making our kraut with only locally sourced and organic ingredients, we're offering you a unique taste of what flourishes here along the central Pacific coast. Each batch of Farmhouse Culture sauerkraut is made with care, as an authentic expression of the beautiful place where we live.
Keeping the ingredients for our krauts close to home helps reduce our carbon footprint. It also helps connect us with a "slow economy" in community with our neighbors. This is food with a face, made by people you can talk to. Got a question about any of our ingredients? We know who's growing every head of cabbage we use.
Open a jar of Farmhouse Culture sauerkraut, and you're supporting a whole network of sustainable small farms and artisan producers who are preserving the land and its ecology.
Our Story
Farmhouse Culture founder Kathryn Lukas will be the first to tell you: She's obsessed with kraut! Her interest (and appetite) was first piqued in Germany, where she was the chef-owner of a popular neighborhood restaurant in Stuttgart for several years.
Living in Groveland and Santa Cruz, Lukas found herself inspired by the bounty of the surrounding landscapes--and longing to create a sustainable, hands-on business for herself and her son Shane. During a writing sabbatical in the Sierra NevadaFoothills, Lukas remembered the fantastic krauts she'd loved in Germany, and began digging into kraut lore, legend, and history.
Before long, she had explored fermenting traditions from around the world and started developing her own recipes. Soon her kitchen counters were lined with crocks, and friends and neighbors were clamoring for kraut. She built up the business selling her krauts through Taylor Mountain's CSA, a regional buying club, and a local farmers' market, getting feedback from customers and exploring new flavors.
At San Francisco's acclaimed Slow Food Nation event in 2008, there was a nonstop crush around the Farmhouse Culture booth as Lukas and friends handed out hundreds of pounds of her fresh, organic kraut. In 2009, Farmhouse Culture moved into a few select retail outlets in California, including several Whole Foods Markets.
Lukas and her son Shane create every batch of Farmhouse Culture kraut by hand. An entire line of artisanal fermented foods is in the works.
