Grant County business owners make trade mission to Korea

MOSES LAKE — Owners from five Grant County-based businesses will have the opportunity to directly introduce eastern Washington products to markets abroad during an eight-day trade mission to South Korea next week.

The five business owners are part of the group, but will represent other companies including Fresh Nature Foods, Cascade Mills Flour, Trinidad Lavender, Whiskey Gap Distillery, Bartelson Transport, Bowman Orchards and reACT Trainer.

“We are literally taking five Grant County businesses over to Gunpo (South Korea) to make connections into markets we believe we can fill. These are already established markets looking for product that Grant County businesses can provide,” said Ray Towry, president of Grant County Economic Development Council (EDC), who will head the nine-person delegation. “We’ll go over there to make these connections and figure out the logistics. Korea already imports a lot of products from Washington already, so we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel.”

Towry said the positives for Grant County will be providing product to the Korean market while generating jobs here at home.

“As the demand increases in Korea, that creates more jobs,” he said. “These businesses are already in Grant County, we’re just helping to connect them with new markets. They’ll be able to grow into those markets. We’ll be able to expand the job base for those companies.”

The Grant County delegation also includes Vern Jenkins, an international trade specialist with the Washington Small Business Development Center (SBDC), and Allan Peterson, an SBDC business advisor located in Moses Lake.

“We’ve been working on exporting for a couple of years and this is a time to actually walk with them through actual meetings over there, face-to-face, to start the process of doing business,” Peterson said. “The Korean International Trade Association is doing the match-making meetings. This very exciting. We’re talking about businesses from Ritzville, Royal City, Quincy and the importance of small business doing international trade. Bringing overseas dollars into small communities can be a huge deal.”

The group will visit various cities, but most of their meetings will be in Gunpo, just south of Seoul. Jenkins, who works with small business owners to build export readiness and export capacity, said Kyle Kim of the Korean International Trade Association and Danny Kim, a representative with the Washington State Department of Agriculture, were extremely helpful in setting up one-on-one meetings for this business-to-business trade event.

The trade mission is a follow-up to a visit that a Gunpo delegation made to Grant County in September. Grant County and Gunpo have had a sister city relationship since 2003.

When Peterson learned a group of business and civic leaders would visit in fall 2015, he offered to set up a small trade expo of eastern Washington products. It was so successful that those involved wanted to keep the momentum going.

“When the Koreans visited last year, they were really impressed with the products and the quality of the products,” said Towry, who has been with Grant County EDC since 2012 and is director of recreation, tourism and public relations for the City of Ephrata. “The conversation evolved into, ‘Let’s make this tangible.’ Let’s bring some advantages to both local economies and how can we do that? We think this is a really great first step. We want to help local businesses continue to grow and this is a great way to help local businesses expand their market.”

Recent Korean market research confirms South Korea has increasing interest in American agricultural products, snack foods, automated tools and manufacturing technologies.