Making soup with a Finger Lakes flavor

When Sarah Carden Cookfair first had the idea for “seed-to-ladle” soups with her husband Alex, it started with a dedication to “healthy soil, healthy food, and healthy community.”

Finger Foods Farm, their small family-run farm in Bloomfield, grows organic-grade produce, which results in sweeter, brilliant flavors when used in soup.

“We wanted to answer this need where there’s something better than a frozen pizza at the end of the day when you need to feed yourself,” says Cookfair. “Our food system has moved toward  very uniform and consolidated production, which ends up being very bland. We breed for size, we breed for uniformity, we breed for shipping quality, but we don’t really breed for flavor anymore.”

So, preserving the flavor of their soups even in frozen form has been a goal. Although the idea originally started with just Finger Foods Farm in mind, the soups and their ingredients now come from across the Finger Lakes region, from garlic farms in Holley and a freezer company in Sodus to a box-and-label business in Rochester and many other partners.

“We were very committed to making fresh-tasting soups that don’t rely on additives for flavor or preservatives to stabilize and whatnot. So, to do that we needed really good-tasting ingredients,” explains Cookfair. “(A) classic example, our butternut squash soup. When you get processed butternut, which is canned or diced, it comes from a larger fruit which gives better yields, needs less peeling, and creates less waste. But you need to add in flavor then.

“When we were piloting it, our co-packer kept saying to us, ‘I think you’re going to need to add sugar,’ and I was like, ‘Just trust me, give it a minute.’ Then we really blew his socks off when we brought in the squash we were using,” she continues. “We use an heirloom fruit which is known for its natural high-brix content, which makes our butternut soups very sweet.”

Besides the butternut squash soup, Finger Foods Farm also has Southwest vegetable, broccoli cheddar, and Tuscan bean soups at participating retailers.

That connection to local agriculture is the concept that earned Finger Foods Farm the Audience Choice Award at the 2025 Grow-NY Summit last month.

The Grow-NY Summit is a two-day contest for Grow-NY accelerator businesses focused on strengthening the food, beverage, and agriculture innovation cluster in the Finger Lakes, the Southern Tier, and Central New York. Empire State Development awarded $3 million in prize money to eight finalists, including Finger Foods Farm. 

This year’s summit had over 270 applicants from 33 states and 41 countries. Fifty-three were from New York, with Renewal Mill of Canandaigua also representing the Finger Lakes region.

“Grow-NY exists to create lasting economic development by attracting startups and investors into our world-class agrifood ecosystem, leveraging innovation to create opportunity, supporting and creating growth for new and existing ventures alike,” says Grow-NY program director Jenn Smith. “We are thrilled to have this year’s winners help us accomplish our goals while moving toward their own.”

The Audience Choice Award is determined by an audience vote for their favorite pitch at the summit. The $10,000 prize represents a “game-changing” amount of capital for scaling the business, Cookfair says.

“For a company like us that is so community-based and wants to help build a better food system, to feel that audience buy-in was very reaffirming. It helped confirm for us that we’re not up here alone,” she adds. 

“I’m not somebody who loves getting up on stage, and I was pretty nervous about it. But when I came off, I had people coming up to me quoting what I had said back to me, and I’ve never had something like that happen. That felt pretty great.”

Cookfair also notes the serendipity with Wegmans sponsoring the award, given that it was one of the farm’s first retailers. Other locations that stock their products include Lori’s Natural Food Center, Provisions Local Goods, and Taste NY Farm Markets at Thruway stops across New York.

Finger Foods hopes to scale up its offerings and continue working with other local farms, and processing and distribution centers to provide soups across the state.

“(Winning the award) really feels like everything is coming together as it should,” says Cookfair.

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.

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