“Organic frozen food for everyone. Finally.”
This journey did not start with a Business Plan. It started with watching my parents and friends try to be healthy and failing. Not because they lack will power or discipline. But because the food system they are buying from is working against them.
Over the years I watch people I love deteriorate slowly and quietly, in ways that felt connected to what they’re eating. The additives, pesticide residue, artificial coloring, and industrial levels of added sugar hiding in product that calls themselves food.
When I lived in France I went to farmers markets, I ate food that was grown without shortcuts, processed without chemicals and sold by people who knew where it came from. I felt different. The connection between what I ate and how I felt was undeniable.
Coming back to the United States was a kind of grief. Not for a place but for the difference. The accessibility to good organic food here is limited to certain demographics as a luxury for people who can afford it and a privilege for people who live near it. That divide felt wrong to me then. It still does.
Star Trek moment
A few years after returning from France, I was developing an online pizza delivery company with a friend and the inventor of Boboli pizza crust. The concept was organic real ingredients real toppings, real food delivered to your door. We had dozens of organic toppings we wanted to offer- vegetables, meats, seafood, and herbs.
The problem was freezing with the standard method IQF, individual quick freezing, that forms ice crystals that ruptured the cells of everything we were trying to preserve. Vegetables turn to mush. Proteins loss their texture. The integrity of everything we were going to source organically was being destroyed in the freezer.
I started researching alternatives and stumbled upon a company in Japan-ABI corporation- that had developed something called the Cells Alive System. CAS uses electromagnetic fields to spin food cells during freezing, preventing ice crystal formation entirely. The food freezes intact. When it thaws, it has returned to the moment it was picked butchered or caught.
We spoke with an executive at ABI over the phone. When we described what we’re trying to accomplish, he was very enthusiastic and said this is Star Trek stuff. There are 2600 commercial units now operating in Japan, South Korea, and moving across Europe. Zero in American retail. The technology exists. The market need exists. Nobody had connected the two.
10 years of carrying
I have carried this for 10 years. 10 years of watching the food industry get worse, not better 10 years of watching corporations live to keep the additives in, the regulations weak, and the organic options, expensive and scarce. 10 years of being discouraged by how systematically the food system has been broken down for profit.
But I kept coming back to the same conviction that technology exist, the farms exist, and the people who needed this most are working families, urban communities with limited organic food access, people who want to feed their children something real. They exist in every city in America.
What does not exist is a store built specifically for them a store where every single product has USDA certified organic or every product is frozen using the CAS technology at the moment of peak harvest. Where the price is competitive because we buy a peak season when supplies high and costs are lowest and hold it for up to 24 months without any loss of quality.
That store is Glacial Organics. And it’s time to build it.
What I am building and why it matters
Glacial Organics is a boutique organic frozen food store, a small format, neighborhood scale, built for the communities that need at most. Starting in the Springfield, Massachusetts area and expand across New England into every city in town with population large enough to sustain a neighborhood store.
We will produce everything in our own Springfield facility- two ABI CAS units, our own packaging line, our own refrigerated delivery fleet. Source from certified organic farms within 100 miles. The Pioneer Valley farms of Western Massachusetts, the organic agricultural network of Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the seafood co-ops of New England coast.
Before the stores open, Glacial Organics will launch a line of organic cast frozen culinary foundation products. Mirepoix, soffritto , fajita mix, roasting medley, sauce, space and more available wholesale to organic grocery stores and food co-ops throughout the region building the brand in the community before, the first store opens it’s doors.
The movement
This is not just a frozen food company. It is a movement.
A movement means that when Glacial Organics opens its first store, working family can buy organic broccoli, grass fed beef, wild cut salmon at a price they can afford and know that none of it contains a single pesticide, additive, or artificial ingredient. That is not a luxury. That is what food should be for everyone.
A movement means that 10 years from now, when someone asked why American frozen food got better-why more farms when organic, why more families could afford to eat without poisoning in their food. Part of the answer is a small store in Springfield, Massachusetts that decided to do it differently.
I want healthy food to be available for everyone at affordable prices. Expanding organic farms building boutique grocery store throughout New England. Educating people that through this technology and organic farming it is possible to be healthier without spending more for quality.
Every contribution to glacier organics is a vote for a food system that works for people, not corporations. For farmers, who deserve a reliable buyer. For families who deserve real food at a fair price. For a country that deserves better than what it has been sold.
With gratitude and conviction,
Mark La Rivière
Founder & CEO-
Glacial Organics
Springfield, Massachusetts
