When Alisia Weaver started at Frontier Co-op as an apprentice in 2020, she faced multiple obstacles. First, she did not own a car. That was a serious problem considering the co-op was headquartered in the rural town of Norway in Benton County, Iowa, which was well outside any bus line; therefore, a company van would pick her up and drive her to the plant. In addition to being without a car, she needed childcare for her son, which Frontier offered in the building for $100 a week. Lastly, she received her apprenticeship after coming out of prison, to which she alluded, “Coming out of a prison, it’s very important to have a reentry plan,” she told Trellis. “When you are trying to readjust and can’t find a job, it’s hard to survive.” Frontier made it easier. Today, she is a machine operator at the co-op with her own vehicle.
Video Courtesy Frontier Co-Op
It would be easy to file that under corporate generosity. However, Tony Bedard, CEO of the organic food manufacturer, describes its Breaking Down Barriers to Employment initiative as primarily a “business-building exercise,” and he was blunt about what drove it. “Our biggest motivation is, honestly, the needs of the business,” he told TriplePundit. “Unemployment was extremely low here in Iowa. We’re growing a lot, and we were having trouble finding people who were interested in coming to work in our factory.” Megan Schulte, VP of human resources, added to Food Industry Executive that “Everybody is looking for workers, and we’re in rural Iowa in the manufacturing industry. We could have sat back and waited for our local or state government to help us, but we decided to be a part of the solution.” After launching in 2018, Frontier had made 20 percent of its production hires through the program by 2022: one in five people on the factory floor.
The initiative is grounded in a simple observation: what keeps people out of manufacturing jobs is usually logistical, not motivational. So the co-op attacked the logistics and broke down barriers to employment. Vans run to the Norway plant multiple times per day to cover every shift, currently benefiting 69 people like Weaver. Childcare is on-site and subsidized, currently serving 81 employees and 103 children for just $120 per child per week. Frontier even provides lockers so workers can store their belongings. Megan Schulte, VP of human resources, explained to HR Brew, “Many times, they want to bring their belongings with them. And that’s because they’ve lost everything else.”
The skills training and apprenticeship program has benefited more than 435 people since 2018, and Frontier has hired more than 285 formerly incarcerated people and people who were struggling with homelessness. Much of that is done through a partnership with Willis Dady Homeless Services in Cedar Rapids, which identifies possible candidates, backed by a $225,000 commitment over three years.
The effect Frontier did not anticipate landed on everyone else. Simmons said the workers proudest of the program are the ones who never needed it: “Our employees, including and almost especially those who didn’t come to us through one of these programs, are so proud to work for a company that invests in people this way.” Bedard told Trellis, “First and foremost, we are getting good employees. Employees who want to be here.”
Video Courtesy Frontier Co-Op
Frontier Co-op began in 1976 as a two-person operation selling herbs and spices out of a small riverside cabin. This year, it turns 50 and now sources botanicals from about 50 countries, ships them to Iowa for manufacturing and packaging, and sells them under the Frontier Co-op, Simply Organic, and Aura Cacia brands. It has more than 600 employees and is held by more than 60,000 member-owners, according to the co-op’s 2025 impact report.
The business is still growing, after purchasing facilities in North Liberty and Belle Plaine in the 2010s. Last July, Frontier broke ground on a $25 million expansion of its Belle Plaine distribution warehouse. This 90,000-square-foot addition will add 16 jobs and free up room for more production lines back in Norway. Belle Plaine City Manager Steve Beck told the Southeast Iowa Union, “It’s a very large project. We’re optimistic about the future and what this means for our community, for our region and for our state.”
The purpose statement printed on nearly everything Frontier produces is “Doing Good, Works.” The comma does real work there. It is a claim about function, not virtue. Alicia Simmons, the co-op’s corporate social responsibility manager, put it plainly to SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal: “We believe there is no friction between doing good in the world and running a successful, profitable business.”
Photo Courtesy Frontier Co-op Careers
The same arithmetic applies at the other end of the supply chain, beyond the hiring initiatives. Through a responsible sourcing program called Well Earth, launched in 2007, and a multi-year partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Cooperative Development Program, Frontier invested more than $5 million in its supply chain over five years, and now aims to reach $8 million by the end of the decade. For example, Frontier is building a tea-processing facility in Kumaon, India, in partnership with Young Mountain Tea, where local farmers will have an ownership stake and derive economic benefits.
The work goes beyond those partnerships and regions, though. Consider Madagascar: Frontier buys about half a million pounds of vanilla extract a year from an island supplying roughly 80% of the world’s vanilla. Prices swing violently, and the growing region has no centralized banking, so in a boom year, farmers have nowhere safe to put the money. They stash it at home, and stashed cash invites theft. Working with the flavor company Virginia Dare, Frontier committed $240,000 over five years to promote a regenerative agroforestry model while helping farmers pool their savings into village associations that lend to one another through the lean years. Those associations now engage more than 275 people, about 80% of them women. An Iowa cooperative looked at a problem an ocean away and prescribed a cooperative.
Frontier was one of the first U.S. spice companies to offer Fair Trade spices, and it has supported organic agricultural practices since its inception in 1976. Most recently, the company introduced its first Regenerative Organic Certified bottled spices in 2024, as it doubles down on building healthier soils, strengthening farming systems, and supporting smallholder farmers.
Rebecca Skipp, Frontier’s source development manager, gave the business case in a sentence. “Without our growers, without our suppliers, we don’t have a product to sell on the shelves,” she told SupplySide. “It’s inherent in us to do good works, but we also see that it does work.”
Video Courtesy Frontier Co-Op
The company also gives back locally. The Simply Organic Giving Fund supports organizations working to nourish millions of food-insecure people living in the United States and Canada, including Matthew 25’s Groundswell Café, a “pay‑it‑forward” eatery in Cedar Rapids. Last year, Simply Organic surpassed $1 million in funding through the program. Senior director of marketing Sheryl Marchetti explained, “Food insecurity is a pervasive and complex issue affecting a vast array of demographics and communities, with access to organic food becoming an even more intangible option. With a deep-rooted history in organics, Simply Organic has a legacy of increasing access to organic food as one of the only organic brands to be addressing food insecurity in the U.S.”
In its own operations, too, Frontier exercises the same amount of care. It installed solar arrays at the Norway, Belle Plaine, and Urbana facilities in 2018, providing its own reliable energy, and it has standardized the use of high‑efficiency lighting and HVAC systems across all facilities. It also diverts 90% of the waste from its facilities from landfill and in 2019 joined the How2Recycle® program from the GreenBlue Institute, whose labels help eliminate confusion about what can be recycled.
What allows a company to spend on everything else for 50 years is written into its ownership structure. Frontier is owned by its wholesale customers, the stores that buy its products and resell them. They decide the company’s future and how money is spent. Often, they pass it to the Frontier Foundation, which has granted more than half a million dollars to groups including Trees Forever. That is a business built to think in decades, which is the horizon on which a savings association in Madagascar and a van route from Cedar Rapids both pay off.
