Shona’s Café
Keeping Lewis County food in Lewis County.
A micro-bakery with an outsized commitment
Lewis County is rural and struggles with an estimated food insecurity rate of around 11.2%. There are plenty of farms growing plenty of food, but very little of it is staying close to home. Shona's has built its entire sourcing model as a quiet argument against that pattern, and I spent time documenting the farms behind her Slow Food ethos.
Keeping Lewis County’s Food in Lewis County
Shona's Café is a small bakery in Chehalis with an outsized commitment: nearly everything on the menu comes from a farm or ranch inside Lewis County. That's not a marketing angle. It's a deliberate, harder-to-execute choice in a region where it’s easier, and often more profitable, to sell what you grow to the bigger markets in Seattle or Portland, and let the local population buy from the grocery store like everyone else.
Lewis County is rural and struggles with an estimated food insecurity rate of around 11.2%. There are plenty of farms growing plenty of food, but very little of it is staying close to home. Shona's has built its entire sourcing model as a quiet argument against that pattern, and in 2026 the café earned a Slow Food Snail of Approval for it. I spent time documenting the farms behind that award (some of whom also have Snail of Approval awards) — the produce, meat, and dairy that shows up in Shona's pastries, meat pies, and sausage rolls every week.
Colvin Ranch: The Beef
Cattle graze on tall, late-summer grass under a line of Douglas fir — the kind of pastoral image that undersells how much coordination it takes to get that beef from a Lewis County grass-finished ranch into a bakery case twenty minutes away. Colvin Ranch is one of Shona's longest-standing local partners, supplying the beef that ends up in her Cornish pasty. It's a relationship that only works because both sides have decided it's worth the extra logistics — from ranch to kitchen, rather than ranch to distributor to somewhere else entirely.
Regeneration Acres: The Pork
The pork in Shona's sausage rolls and Piggie pies comes from Idaho Pastured Pigs raised on open grass in Onalaska by Chris and Hanna Volmert of Regeneration Acres. They raise a cross bred specifically to forage rather than stand on concrete, fed non-GMO grain with no corn or soy which produces exceptionally flavorful fat. Behind the pasture, the Volmerts are several years into a silvopasture project: chestnut, oak, mulberry, and persimmon trees planted alongside the animals, hand-watered from a tote because there's no irrigation system yet. It's a farm built for the next ten years, not the next ten weeks, and it's also part of an informal network of neighboring farms that trade forage and favors instead of invoices, the kind of quiet cooperation that rarely shows up on a label but shapes everything about how the meat gets raised.
TUNaWERTH Creamery: The Dairy
Shona's dairy comes from TUNaWERTH Creamery in Oakville, a family operation now in its second generation — Jessica and Tjeerd de Boer took over the cheese and dairy traditions Tjeerd's parents, Peter and Anita, brought with them from the Netherlands in 1995. The creamery does almost everything itself: pasteurizing, bottling, cheesemaking, and delivery, with no middleman between the cow and the counter. That kind of vertical, family-run operation is exactly the sort of small producer a place like Shona's has to seek out on purpose. This was dairy that was never going to find its own way into a Chehalis bakery without someone building the relationship first.
Hop Frog Farm: The Microgreens
Trays of magenta and green microgreens grow under warehouse lighting at Hop Frog Farm, destined for the baps sandwiches that have become one of Shona's signatures. It's the smallest-footprint ingredient in this whole chain and, in some ways, the clearest example of the model: a tiny, hyper-local grower with a product that a bigger buyer would likely never bother sourcing regionally, given a reliable home in a bakery just down the road.
The Bigger Argument
None of these partnerships are dramatic on their own — a rancher, a hog farmer, a dairy family, a microgreen grower, all doing their own work, mostly unnoticed. Strung together through one small-town bakery's purchasing decisions, they add up to something closer to an argument: that a rural county can feed itself, and feed its own economy, if enough people along the supply chain choose the harder, closer option over the easier, farther one. Shona's has made that choice on nearly every ingredient it can. Not every restaurant in the region has embraced this model — yet.
Shona's Cafe is located at 570 N Market Blvd, Chehalis, WA. Learn more about their purveyors at shonascafe.com.