From Zero AI Citations to 22: How UnoSearch Made Solnfield Organic Supply Co. the Supplier ChatGPT Recommends

Solnfield Organic Supply Co. was founded in Portland, Oregon in 2020 by Claire Ashworth, a former supply chain manager who spent eight years sourcing ingredients for natural food brands before deciding to build a supplier that small and mid-size food manufacturers could actually trust.

The company sources and supplies certified organic spices, herbs, pulses, grains, and natural sweeteners every product carrying USDA Organic, Non-GMO, and Gluten-Free certification. Solnfield works directly with a network of organic farms across the Pacific Northwest and select international growing regions, offering the kind of traceable, certified supply chain that food manufacturers increasingly demand from their ingredient partners.

By early 2024, Solnfield had built a small but genuinely loyal client base of 14 regional food brands companies that had found Claire through trade shows, industry connections, and word-of-mouth. The product quality and certification standards were never in question. The problem was that beyond their existing network, almost nobody could find Solnfield at all.

Their website had no structured product data, no content built for search or AI discovery, and zero presence across any AI platform. A food brand searching for a new organic ingredient supplier whether through Google or through ChatGPT had no way of knowing Solnfield existed.

Somewhere in the United States, a procurement manager at a food manufacturing company is searching for a certified organic spice supplier. Increasingly, that search doesn’t start with Google. It starts with a question typed into ChatGPT or Perplexity: “recommend certified organic spice suppliers in the USA.”

For Solnfield Organic Supply Co., that conversation was happening thousands of times a month across the food and beverage industry and Solnfield was never part of it. Not because their products weren’t excellent. Not because their USDA Organic certification wasn’t legitimate. But because nothing about Solnfield’s digital presence had ever been structured in a way that AI platforms could find, trust, and cite.

Every AI-generated recommendation that left Solnfield out was a buyer relationship that started somewhere else. In an industry where B2B purchasing decisions increasingly begin with an AI query rather than a Google search, that invisibility was costing Solnfield contracts they never even knew existed.

Before building a strategy, UnoSearch researched how food and beverage procurement professionals actually source new ingredient suppliers in 2024 and the data pointed to a clear, urgent opportunity.

B2B ingredient buyers overwhelmingly begin their supplier research online before ever making direct contact and a growing majority now use AI tools specifically as part of that research process, asking for supplier recommendations, certification verification, and product category comparisons directly through conversational AI.

Critically, buyers who discover a supplier through an AI recommendation behave differently than buyers who find one through a generic directory listing. An AI citation functions as an implicit pre-vetting signal the AI has effectively done the first round of due diligence, summarizing the supplier’s certifications, specialties, and credibility in a way the buyer trusts more readily than a cold search result.

For Solnfield, this meant AI citations weren’t a nice-to-have SEO tactic. They were the single highest-leverage opportunity to reach buyers who had never heard of the company at the exact moment those buyers were actively evaluating new suppliers.

UnoSearch built a complete GEO strategy around a single objective: make Solnfield Organic Supply Co. structurally impossible for AI platforms to ignore when buyers asked about certified organic ingredient suppliers.

By month 4, Solnfield earned its first verified AI citation. By month 9, that number had grown to 22 active citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews appearing as a recommended supplier whenever buyers asked AI platforms about certified organic spices, herbs, pulses, grains, or sweeteners sourced from US suppliers.

The qualitative shift mattered just as much as the citation count. Claire Ashworth began hearing something she’d never heard before from new inbound contacts: buyers explicitly mentioning that they’d found Solnfield through ChatGPT or Perplexity, often already familiar with the company’s certifications and product range before the first conversation even began. The AI citation had done the work of building initial trust UnoSearch had simply made sure Solnfield was the company AI tools chose to trust.

Twelve months transformed Solnfield from a locally-known supplier into a nationally discoverable brand with genuine AI search authority.

AI citations grew from 0 to 22 across all major platforms. Organic search visibility expanded from near zero to Page 1 rankings across 18 target keywords. Monthly B2B inquiries grew from 3 to 47+ a more than 15x increase. And perhaps most significantly, Solnfield’s market reach expanded from local Pacific Northwest relationships to active business across 11 US states, with new export inquiries from 4 international markets that had never previously been on the company’s radar.

The AI citations and organic search authority compounded each other throughout the campaign every new piece of structured product content that earned a citation also strengthened the organic ranking signals search engines used to evaluate the same pages. By December 2024, Solnfield wasn’t just being found. It was being recommended by AI platforms, in the exact moment a buyer was deciding who to trust with their next ingredient sourcing contract.