If you’ve ever had a can of Campbell’s split pea soup, you can thank Spokane Seed Company.
Spokane’s oldest pea and lentil processor has thrived for close to a century thanks to the region’s high quality legumes and the company’s exclusive contracts with high profile brands.
Now, A-I, drones and gluten intolerance are shaping the future of world… peas.
Andrew Fontaine is the president of Spokane Seed Company. Spokane Seed was originally a seed catalog company, which is how it got its name in 1908.
“We had field representatives that would just go and deliver these catalogs," Fontaine said. "One of those field representatives was my great-grandfather.”
Fontaine’s great-grandfather bought his employer company in the 1930s, when wheat dominating the Palouse. But new German immigrants were planting peas and lentils, too.
“What they noticed is that when you rotate crops with wheat with pulses—peas, lentils and chickpeas—you see an increased yield," he said.
Those farmers were reaping the benefits of nitrogen-fixing.
Wheat takes a lot of nitrogen out of the soil. Legumes are able to take nitrogen from the air and put it in the soil. By replacing wheat with lentils every few years, farmers could repair soil health while still growing a profitable crop.
“My great-grandfather said, 'We are going to concentrate only on peas and lentils because it's going to be a thing,'" Fontaine said. "Well, here we are in 2025. We're still around.”
That is with no small thanks to the split pea.
“We were the first company in the US and even probably in North America to put a pea splitter in," he said. "And then in the early or mid 1940s, my great grandfather went to a food brokers convention in Chicago and came across a company called Campbell Soup.”
Campbell was just starting to consider branching out from tomato soup.
“In 1947, we ended up getting their contract for their split pea soup contract and we still have them exclusive to this day," Fontaine said. "So most people probably don't realize that if they're having split pea soup from Campbell Soup, it comes from Spokane and it comes from the Palouse region."
From there, the brand contracts have kept on coming. Progressive, Gerber, Heinz, Goya. Fontaine says Spokane Seed supplies about 40% of Spain's Pardina lentil consumption every year.
"So the facility down in Colfax runs five to six days a week. We're trying to ship 30 million pounds of this product over into Spain every year," he said. "It's a pretty big deal for not only us, but for the farmers in the area, it's pretty much only grown in the area.”
India is by far the world’s largest grower, consumer and importer of lentils. But tariff wars often make it hard for Americans to sell there.
“If India sneezes, the rest of the world gets the flu," Fontaine said. "If they decide they're going to take it, then oh my gosh, it's a big trigger to the market. Right now we're on a tariff relief with India until March for just yellow peas.”
But domestically, less tolerance for gluten means more interest in pea-based alternatives.
Bob’s Red Mill chickpea flour? Banza’s high protein pasta? All those chickpeas are sourced from Spokane Seed.
Because as much as Fontaine loves the olive oil-drenched lentils he eats every time he’s in Spain, he doesn’t think the market for whole beans will grow.
The bigger market is in what he calls “value-added products.”
“If you go to Safeway and you look down the aisle of the canned condensed soups and the dry packaged material, there's a certain demographic on that aisle—if there's anyone on that aisle," he said. "But if you go to, like, Rosauers and Huckleberry’s and there's all the cool, value-added gluten-free extruded snacks or protein bars, there's a different demographic. It's pretty popular.”
To separate out only the highest quality legumes, the company has some pretty high powered tech.
“It's an electric eye optic color sorter," Fontaine said. "It actually takes a photograph of every single kernel. It looks for size, shape, color and density.”
If the machine “sees” something it doesn’t like, a perfectly-timed puff of air will push a pea or lentil into the reject bin. Each machine can sort about 60,000 pounds an hour, and Spokane Seed has six of them.
But Fontaine has his eye on new machines outfitted with artificial intelligence.
"What it does, basically, is you set the tolerance levels that you find acceptable for all aspects," he said. "If it sees it hit or exceed any threshold at any given moment, it will slow down or speed up depending on what it wants to do.”
In other words, those machines are able to recalibrate themselves based on the flaws they’re “seeing” in the product — basically taking over an operator's main role. A real person can override it if necessary, but can do so remotely if need be.
But AI isn’t the only way that Spokane Seed is moving into the future. It’s also using tech to help its farmers reduce herbicide and pesticide use.
“I will tell you, without those products we have a food shortage in the United States," Fontaine said. "The need for the chemicals aren't going away, but neither is the consumer's idea that they don't want it.”
Spokane Seed is partnering with a farmer who’s also a software engineer. He’s outfitted a drone that can survey a field and create a density map of where the most weeds are. That means the farmer can spray only where weeds pose the most threat.
“We've so far been able to demonstrate up to 60% reduction in residue," Fontaine says. "That's great for me as a marketer. [But] the second thing and really the the main reason why this is going to probably be very popular is that that farmer can also reduce his expenses by 70% related to his purchasing of herbicide.”
The demand for high quality, nutritious, safe and affordable food is only growing. The task facing Spokane Seed now is how to a-PEAS it.
