About Wise Goat
We’re a small, family & woman owned business based out of San Benito County, California. Our mission is to offer nutrient dense, nourishing foods for the community to enjoy and thrive. We have products that range from sauerkraut to nut butters, tinctures and teas. All of our ferments are produced in small, hand-crafted batches that are made in glass and stainless steel vessels. This ensures a proper fermentation process that provides maximum nutritional benefit while avoiding the possibility of chemicals leaching into the food as often happens with plastic. Our nut butters are soaked, sprouted and slowly stone-ground to enhance the nutrients while preserving the healthy oils from the nuts. We focus on sourcing ingredients from local, organic and sustainable farmers within 20 miles of our commercial kitchen. Our selections vary with seasonality and we strive to reduce our environmental impact in all ways possible.
Founder / CEO – Mary Risavi
Mary is a Colorado native who has had a passion for horses since she was very young. During college she decided to pursue her dreams as a natural horsemanship trainer. This career eventually brought her to the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains and expanded her training business throughout the South Bay.
An exciting change in her career arose when she was asked to help sell organic produce for a local farmer in Hollister. Quickly she discovered a new passion in health and nutrition. Mary applied similar principles of understanding health as she did horses and found great parallel.
She is now a Nutritional Therapy and Functional Diagnostic Practitioner/ GAPS Specialist and Kresser Institute Alumni. She has her masters in Traditional Chinese Medicine and is a licenced Acupuncturist in the state of California.
Mary applies her knowledge of functional medicine as well as traditional Chinese medicine to the foods offered through Wise Goat Organics to elevate their purpose in healing and in health.
General Manager – Hailey Kemp
Hailey’s first job was cutting apricots in half every summer to dry in the hot San Benito sunshine, just blocks away from her childhood home. In highschool she fell in love with selling those apricots at farmers markets and continued working with food in different capacities throughout college, obtaining a Bachelor’s of Arts in Communication and Media studies at Cal State Monterey Bay.
Her love of creating community via food and drink has established over a decade of specialty service experience, ranging from craft coffee & beer sales, catering and event coordination, to helping open multiple restaurants. She firmly believes that food is the best way to bring people together, build cultural understanding, and sustain good health.
What led Hailey to Wise Goat was a desire to become more connected to food at the roots: not only how the products we eat are made and get on our plates, but where they come from before that and how it affects the greater community, including farmers, consumers, and the planet.
Though her focus as General Manager at Wise Goat is primarily on operations and sales, Hailey loves to engage with people at farmers markets, while sampling at grocery stores, and on Wise Goat’s social media. When she isn’t working, you can find her on a trail with her tiny dog or creating a new variation of avocado toast – if you see her out and about, say hi!
Whats in the name
I named the company “Wise Goat Organics” after watching my baby goats graze in the pasture. I noticed they were very selective on what weeds, trees and grasses they would eat. They would even be selective on the specific part of the plant they wanted. This seemed to vary with the time of day, season, age and any health problems they were facing. I thought this was very wise of them and felt as humans we should do our best to follow this approach.
– Mary
Wise News
Hot sauces made with fermentation tend to have more complex flavors than unfermented ones. They are made by lacto-fermenting hot chili peppers with purified or dechlorinated water and salt, and sealing the ingredients in an airtight jar or fermentation seal.
Mary Risavi had been making her own fermented food concoctions for years and always looked for ways to make them healthier. Yet the Hollister resident didn’t think of it as more than a hobby until demand boomed. “Then I realized it was an actual business,” she says.
Wise Goat Organics Finalists: Vegan Kimchi, Vegan Kimchi Hot Sauce, Green Garden Sauerkraut, Fermented Spicy Mustard
Everything about the look of Mary Risavi’s Wise Goat Organics fermented products telegraphs their freshness and taste before you even open a jar.
“Everything I use is very, very locally sourced,” Risavi said. “I use organic produce from Coke Farms and Pinnacle Farms, Lakeside, and sometimes Coast Produce. Pretty much everything comes from places not further than about a 20-minute drive from the kitchen.
Pre-, pro- and postbiotics are present in fermented foods, which is good news for cabbage producers, as sauerkraut and kimchi top the lists of readily available fermented foods.
Mary is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and a specialist in the GAPS diet and Functional Diagnostics. She applies her knowledge of fermentation to optimize the nutritional value and probiotic benefit of vegetables, which she offers through the foods she sells at Wise Goat Organics.
At times like this, as your digestive system wonders how it will cope, you would be well counseled by Mary Risavi’s wise goats, which, she noticed, always knew what corrective plants to eat when they needed similar help.
“There was no question of whether I was going to use organic or conventional ingredients. It was always certified organic,” says Mary Risavi, owner of Wise Goat Organics. Sourcing from local organic farms has always been at the heart of Mary’s fermented food products, but as a small business owner, the costs and added work of getting that USDA organic seal felt daunting for her.