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Published on: 1/3/2008
Last Visited: 1/3/2008
Robbie Wood, formerly the executive chef at Georges' on Tybee, is excited about his new endeavor.Angela Hopper-Lee/For the Closeup
Robbie Wood, formerly the executive chef at Georges\u2019 on Tybee, is excited about his new endeavor.Angela Hopper-Lee/For the Closeup
Robbie Wood is starting the new year by making a big change - going from creating fine-dining experiences for customers at an upscale restaurant on Tybee Island to cooking lots of baby food.
For a little more than half a decade, Wood was the executive chef at Georges' on Tybee, which was scheduled to have closed on New Year's Eve 2007.
Starting this month, Robbie's going to be devoting much of his time whipping up entrees for infants.
And he's excited about the endeavor, because it will be part of his new corporation and because the baby food he'll be making will be organic.
Robbie - a 29-year-old resident of downtown Savannah who spent much of his youth on Tybee - is an enthusiastic advocate of the healthful effects of organic food, a subject he's researched and become quite knowledgeable about.
"We know organic foods promote good health - we don't have all the details and repercussions on commercial food," he said, referring to the produce grown on large-scale farms that use fertilizers and pesticides laced with chemicals.
He believes his fledgling baby food operation, Peachy Baby, will be something special in our part of the country.Robbie said a search of the Internet turned up only four significant producers of organic baby food in the United States and "none in the Southeast of any size or consequence."
Peachy Baby - which Wood will own in partnership with Wayne Lee, who runs Natural Earth Solutions, an organic lawn and landscape care company based on Wilmington Island - will be a subsidiary of Green Tomato Concepts, a distributor and processor of organic produce that Robbie founded last year.Peachy Baby - which Wood will own in partnership with Wayne Lee, who runs Natural Earth Solutions, an organic lawn and landscape care company based on Wilmington Island - will be a subsidiary of Green Tomato Concepts, a distributor and processor of organic produce that Robbie founded last year.
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Another subsidiary of Wood's corporation will be a specialty meats operation that will make tasso ham and applewood- and cherrywood-smoked bacon using pork produced by the Eden Natural cooperative, whose 28 Midwestern family farms raise hogs that are fed a vegetarian diet free of antibiotics and hormonal additives.
Robbie told me in late December that he expected to have both subsidiaries up and running this month.
He incorporated Green Tomato Concepts in November and, by the end of the year, was distributing organic produce grown in southeast Georgia to restaurants and three local retail outlets.
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Wood said he started his distributorship while securing the products he needed for a cookbook he was creating.
"I embarked on my first cookbook in July," he states at his Web site, www.greentomatoconcepts.com, "wanting to focus on what we do at Georges' - which is to showcase local organic produce, seafood, cheeses and more."
The idea of going into organic baby-food production came from Wayne Lee, who's been a friend of Robbie's for about five years and once supplied Wood with organic tomatoes that Lee grew.
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"As the company develops, I'll be representing the products and he'll be in the background, making sure the production end of it runs smoothly," said Robbie of Lee.
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Robbie said "fresh, organic seasonal ingredients" will be used in making the baby food, which will be created at the outset at a local caterer's "production kitchen" in Effingham County.
"I'll buy the produce raw, and we'll process it and jar it," Robbie said, noting that he's been "doing a lot of research" on making baby food - including some taste tests - since August.
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Robbie's been involved in the food-service industry since he was 14, when he began working part-time in the restaurant business while attending Benedictine Military School in Savannah.
"By the time I was 18, I was running a (chain restaurant) kitchen in Athens," he said of his experiences during his years at the University of Georgia, "and, at 19, I started working for my first chef."
He "fell in love with cooking," and soon found himself devoting more time to that pursuit than to his college studies.
"I was working 50 hours a week and going to school 10," Robbie said.
He started working at Georges' in 1999, "chopping up salads and doing whatever I was told to do," he said, and he became the head chef at the restaurant five and a half years ago.
His new ventures will take him in new directions, but Wood will also continue to cook.
In addition to doing some restaurant consulting work, he plans to offer organic cooking demonstrations and to do some catering and some chef-for-hire work.
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