Focus on Coop Suppliers: Blue Q Fruit and Produce Company

by Suzanne Fisher

Honest Weight is now carrying a new soap called Get Real Soap, Mint with Bite. Made with essential oil and no added color, this soap features fresh mint with exfoliating jojoba beads and moisturizing avocado butter. It is totally natural and vegetable-based. Each 4.5 oz. bar is smoothly curved on one side and studded with rounded massaging protrusions on the other. Trevor Ward, operations manager and frequent spokesperson for Blue Q Fruit and Produce Company, describes this soap as the one you would use daily, between your monthly massage therapy treatment and your weekly loofa sponge scrub down. The wrapping for this bath-time treat is not the usual soap box, but rather sports a tiger and some very unexpected design features. These are indicative of the company and its other offerings as a whole. In fact, the folks who bring us this sumptuous soap have a lot more going on than you would ever imagine.

The Blue Q company does not sell fruit and produce. When founders Seth and Mitch Nash pooled their artistic, business and technical engineering talents, they planned on creating a lighting company. Instead, they found themselves finding niches in the gift market and filling them with a variety of products, with the emphasis on quality and design. Their products include tshirts, posters, matches, car air fresheners, candy, gum, tote bags, magnets, stickers, tattoos and a wide selection of personal care items. Their website (www.blueq.com) has a home page that will make you laugh out loud, plus a list of all their products, which are even more amusingly irreverent. Let’s just say that you might not want any young children checking it out, but you shouldn’t miss it!

Blue Q’s warehouse and offices are located in Pittsfield (Mass.), home town of Seth and Mitch. Here they come up with ideas, and design and test products produced according to their specifications by manufacturers mostly in the New England area. While all Blue Q brands are non-petroleum and all their soaps are vegetable-based, the Get Real brand is a newer line of all-natural products which the company is working on increasing because the demand for more nature-based personal care items is growing. Trevor pointed out that the terms “natural” and “all-natural” are not regulated by law, and show up frequently on goods that have ingredients in them that many people would not think of as occurring in nature. The Get Real brand represents in part Blue Q’s most strenuous effort at satisfying the more stringent requirements of some of their retailers, as well as the growing demand for purer personal care products.

In addition to providing us with some truly natural products and being a local producer, Blue Q has a commitment to the community in which it and its 30 regular employees reside. They have a program established with Berkshire County Association of Retarded Citizens for performing many of the assembling and packaging tasks that arise. The association provides supervision and 12 employees who receive wages for their work, providing them with meaningful and productive employment in a supportive environment.

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