Barriers to a sustained and broad-based U.S. manufacturing comeback are well documented, but what opportunities should local and regional businesses and planners be focusing on? What industries or market openings best fit the attributes of local economies?

There are also opportunities leading manufacturers across industry boundaries to partner with companies that have similar customers and values. Business leaders should take note.

One area of considerable promise is the intersection between outdoor industry and natural products — calling cards of the economies of the American West. Think about it: Consumers of healthy food and beverages are often the same people leading active outdoor lifestyles.

Alissa Sears is co-founder of AdVenturesAcademy and VP growth & strategy at Christie & Co, a communications firm focused on companies across the natural products, outdoor, and sustainable agriculture industries. At Outdoor Retailer’s Summer Market in Denver this July, she’s organizing an event to showcase businesses operating at the intersection of these dynamic industries to like-minded investors.

“We have focused on the intersection of outdoor and natural products because of the inherent consumer alignments and shared values,” says Sears, “but it’s also about unrealized efficiencies. As retail continues to evolve, oscillating between e-commerce and brick and mortar, we’ve seen increased interest in natural products companies seeking to differentiate through being where their consumers live and play — camping, on hikes, in climbing gyms, or wherever their lifestyle choices take them.”

Sears sees retailers getting in the game as well, as does anyone who’s walked past the wall of energy bars and natural good products at an REI checkout. “Outdoor retailers are also looking for ways to increase frequency of customer visits, provide education around ‘clean fuel’ for their customers, and find other ways to add to their shopping experience,” says Sears. “Food, beverage, nutrition, and personal care have increasingly been seen as opportunities to achieve those goals.”

In the vernacular of these newly connecting industries, retailers are new “experiential channels,” according to Zach DeAngelo, partner at the brand management firm Rodeo CPG. For retailers, according to DeAngelo, Sears’ “clean fuel” is “a natural extension and opportunity to deepen customer engagement and experiential education.”

Heady stuff, and it’s not only product manufacturers and their distribution channels that are evolving. Investors are taking note, according to Sears. “We’ve also seen investors who have traditionally focused on one sector or the other realize the alignments and crossover opportunities,” she says. “They’re already a critical part of the growth ecosystem, and here, they also have the ability to help shape these emerging opportunities, with funds to expedite growth, guidance around prioritizing growth strategies, and the experience and wisdom of knowing when to say no. They are key growth partners and it’s essential to ensure alignment to best overcome the inherent challenges of growth together.”

Sears accomplishes this by bringing together companies and investors in out-of-the-box environments. When I mention the investor conferences we’ve hosted in Denver the past few years, she smiles — a “been there, done that” nod that was just less than disapproving. But why meet in a conventional venue when the mountains of Ecuador beckon?

“We harness the power of adventure to deepen engagement,” she explains, “bringing together entrepreneurs, investors and industry leaders at this intersection and get them outdoors together through our experiential programming — Colorado backcountry hut trips, surf trips in California, climbing in Ecuador. We know that the best businesses are the ones that do it differently. Push the limits. Make the impossible possible.”

She adds, “Companies are adapting to rapidly shifting terrain, realizing that ‘business as usual’ is no more. They are getting more creative in how they approach growth, exploring new distribution channels, developing collaborative product lines, engaging advisors and investors with cross-sector experience.”

Denver’s not Ecuador, but Sears has something special in mind for the pitch event at Outdoor Retailer. “The Entrepreneur + Investor [Tent]Pitch will go beyond the traditional pitch event to highlight the importance of aligned relationships between entrepreneurs and investors through connecting at a deeper level. We will showcase eight entrepreneur and investor teams at the intersection of outdoor and natural products, bringing together key decision makers from both industries to explore opportunities to align forces and unlock crossover growth opportunities.”

Sears is accepting applications for both companies and investors to participate in the OR pitch event. Contact her here, or drop me a line.

Bart Taylor is publisher of CompanyWeek. Reach him at btaylor@companyweek.com.

Last November, we reported that a group in San Francisco was in the process of bringing Naturally Boulder‘s community-building model west, to better organize and accelerate northern California’s natural and organic product ecosystem. Vision became reality January 21 with the sold-out kickoff of Naturally Bay Area at the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco.

Naturally Bay Area is the first “regional affiliate” of a fledgling Naturally Boulder network. On one hand, it’s an acknowledgment of the staggering success of Colorado’s natural food and product community and NB’s community-building methodology. It’s also more proof, if any was needed, of the profound change transforming America’s gargantuan food industry. From Boulder to San Francisco, Brooklyn to Portland, a wave of early-stage brands has captivated both consumers and the industrial brands that, until now, have decided what we eat and how its made and distributed. Today, industry innovation resides squarely in emerging food and product communities throughout the country.

Naturally Bay Area will provide structure and organization to what until now has been a loose ecosystem of brands, service companies, investment partners, and other business mentors. If history repeats, Naturally Bay Area will become a community-building engine, nurturing startups, accelerating promising brands, and enhancing the delivery of key services to natural product entrepreneurs.

Less certain is how brands will manufacture. With a more efficient commercialization of ideas, demand for manufacturing should explode. But within the Bay Area’s technology-driven economy, prospects for a qualified manufacturing workforce are sketchy, and manufacturing infrastructure lacking. Where will Naturally Bay Area members make their products?

The evolution of Colorado’s model suggests that a network of new production resources will develop alongside brands. Powered by technology from food-savvy entrepreneurs like The Food Corridor, it should be much easier for early-stage brands to locate commercial kitchens than it was for companies a decade ago. Brands should be able to escape the limitations of one’s own kitchen earlier and easier.

For later-stage companies, a co-packer that manufactures for multiple brands is often the next destination. Colorado’s network of co-packers has been every bit the catalyst as brands in the development of its natural food play. Will a more capable network of Bay Area co-packers develop to meet demand?

If brands can’t manufacture here they’ll move or sell — to industrial producers with the capability to scale manufacturing and accommodate an influx of new products. It’s the goal of industrial players today to do just that, to innovate through acquisition instead of organic growth. Big Food has waved the white flag: It’s given up on competing with the innovation flashed by early-stage food companies. Today it buys innovation.

Exits are fine, but the goal of Naturally Bay Area and the public/private resources sure to rally in support, is the development of a thousand new brands, employing dozens of employees each, driven by the promise of sustained business and manufacturing support. It’s the promise of the sector in California or Colorado: to incubate middle-market growth companies that cut a wide swath through the economy, not the narrow, top-down ecosystem that consumers and entrepreneurs are abandoning.

Who, then, will rally California’s manufacturing ecosystem? In San Francisco and the Bay Area, the workforce challenge alone is enough to stop development cold. In this tech-centric economy, where will food manufacturing’s new labor force come from? What cities and communities will move to develop facilities and provide incentives for companies to stay and thrive? Where will a new manufacturing workforce find affordable housing?

And as Naturally Boulder evolves to the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego, are public and private resources ready to rally around manufacturing?

Colorado’s ecosystem has grown organically, without a concerted effort from public officials to juice its development. Given the scale of the manufacturing challenge, California’s natural product innovators may not have that luxury.

Bart Taylor is publisher of CompanyWeek. Email him at btaylor@companyweek.com.

U.S. manufacturing enters 2018 with momentum and considerable promise. For starters, in this golden age of corporatism, America’s blue-chip manufacturing brands are prospering.

More than that, manufacturers have a once-in-a-generation chance to improve their own fortunes by investing the windfall of tax reform into new companies and a more capable domestic supply chain.

Whether American OEMs choose to do so may define the fortunes of the sector for the next decade. It’s why this moment holds both promise and peril.

Here’s why manufacturing will, or won’t, prosper in 2018.

Will:

1. There are fewer big companies in the U.S. as influence and power consolidate into a new corporate oligarchy, but those at the top are thriving. Confidence within the membership of the National Association of Manufacturers has never been higher.

2. Lower corporate tax rates will provide a short-term financial boost for companies large and small, and a long-term benefit for those that reinvest in new factories and equipment.

3. Powerful trends point to sustained employment growth in multiple manufacturing industries even as robotics and automation put downward pressure on job growth in others.

4. Today, communities seek out manufacturing companies when, a decade ago, light industrial employers were less attractive than technology and service companies.

5. Higher education doesn’t deserve much of the self-serving attacks from its critics, but trends redirecting young people into trade and away from four-year degrees serve the economy, and manufacturing, well. There’s good reason to believe we’re on our way to solving manufacturing’s long-term labor challenge. The battleship has been turned.

6. Ask most anyone if it’s important that we make more stuff in America, and they’ll likely say yes. As obvious as this may sound, it’s a cultural sea change. We value manufacturing again.

Won’t:

1. Large manufacturers are prospering, but many small and middle-market manufacturers operate on a knife’s edge. Incentives, access to capital, labor, technology, new markets, and OEM supply chains tilt to a shrinking cadre of large companies and away from smaller operators. It’s also unclear whether blue-chip OEMs are committed to a more capable domestic supply chain; whether a newfound tax windfall, pressure from the White House, or new tariffs will compel big companies to make more in America.

Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect notes that Steve Jobs once remarked to President Obama that “Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China.” What if Apple had invested in U.S. labor and infrastructure? “If those 700,000 were employed directly by Apple, of course, then Apple would be the world’s largest manufacturer. “Instead,” Meyerson says, “Apple conceals its factories — and responsibility for the working conditions there — behind two Chinese walls.”

Have things changed? We’ll find out. President Trump and the GOP Congress have provided U.S. corporations the means to invest in a new domestic supply chain; they’ve also provided us a measuring stick. If OEMs shift their gaze onshore, we’ll know.

2. Public sector support for manufacturing can be spotty. There’s no uniform manufacturing ‘playbook’ for developers, a challenge to begin with as manufacturing spans mulitple industries.

Meyerson’s Apple example underscores why this is important. Is a company that designs or engineers a consumer product locally, but is forced to push production offshore because of a lackluster domestic supply chain, a tech or design firm or a manufacturing company?

What if we’d celebrated our community of contract manufacturers the past decade as we do tech firms, and made it easy for our fictional design company to locate domestic production here?

Manufacturing’s future lies in the supply chain. 2018 included.

Bart Taylor is publisher of CompanyWeek. Contact him at btaylor@companyweek.com.

Related: Five reasons why manufacturing jobs are coming back to stay