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Arcata’s Tofu Shop Specialty Foods, a local institution and staple of the region’s natural food scene since the heyday of the back-to-the-land hippie movement, will close permanently by the end of the year.

Tofu Shop founder and owner Matthew Schmit in 2018. | Screenshot.

Reached by phone this morning, owner and founder Matthew Schmit confirmed that he plans to retire after next month, nearly 50 years since he and his then-partner opened an artisan tofu shop in Telluride, Colo. Three years later, in 1980, Schmit opened his tofu shop in Arcata as a takeout deli and small-scale manufacturing facility.

“We are going to be operating through the end of the year, and then I will be closing down the shop,” Schmit told the Outpost. He declined to elaborate at this time, saying, “Things are just kind of new and happening.”

According to the company’s website, Schmit’s interest in local food systems inspired him to help found a food co-op in rural Colorado. That’s where he was introduced to “the art of organic tofu making,” the site says. 

The Tofu Shop operated as a deli-manufacturing combo for a dozen years, but in 1992 it became one of the founding businesses in Arcata’s Foodworks Culinary Center. Since then, the company has focused on growing its manufacturing and wholesale business. 

Tofu Shop products displayed in a cooler at the Eureka Winco.

“In 2002 we were able to qualify for local financing and built this building we’re in right now,” Schmit says in a 2018 video produced by Eureka Natural Foods. (Scroll down to watch the whole video.)

At the time, the Tofu Shop was producing up to 250,000 pounds of tofu a year, and its organic product line has expanded to include dozens of products, including a variety of smoked and flavored tofu in various degrees of firmness, plus tofu-based breakfast sausage, potato patties, soy milk, salads, spreads, tofu burgers and even sauerkraut. (No tofu goes into that last one.)

And the products aren’t just sold here in Humboldt County. They’re available in grocery stores and natural food shops across California and up into Oregon, plus they’re served in roughly 50 restaurants, from vegetarian and sushi spots to delis, breweries and barbecue joints.

Schmit remains fascinated with the history of tofu, from its origin in China more than 2,000 years ago through its adoption by western vegetarians in the 1970s as a healthy meat substitute.

“But for me as a tofu maker, it’s much more than that,” he says in the video below. “It’s been around for thousands of years, kind of like bread and cheese, and that’s really where its real power and the source of its vitality comes from.”