For years, Michael Potter has gotten regular offers to buy his organic foods company near Ann Arbor, Mich., although now, he said, he gets three or four every week.

“Every food company you have ever heard of has tried to buy this company,” said the founder, chairman and president of Eden Foods Inc. “Not most of them. Every one of them.”

Venture capitalists have tried to woo Potter as well, he said. But Potter has refused to sell, or even to take on investment capital that would allow him to expand, earning ridicule from peers who say he is missing what he calls the “big payoff” and bucking a trend of consolidation in an industry that last year rang up $24 billion in sales.

“What I do is meaningful. It needs to be done,” Potter said. “And it’s fun.”

For Potter, selling to a big corporation, or joining forces with venture capitalists, would mean selling out the very essence of organic: small, alternative and individualistic.

Definitely not like the processed food companies that manufacture most of what we see in grocery store aisles.

Potter fears for consumers who believe they are supporting the local, pastoral ethic at the heart of organics but who in reality are boosting sales of the huge conglomerates they tend to view warily.

Not that growth is always bad, or that big food companies cannot produce top-notch organic products. The economies of scale those companies can introduce allow them to deliver organic products to more people, in mainstream supermarkets, sometimes at lower prices. The fact is, corporate ownership has helped fuel the industry’s dramatic growth.

Today the big players in organic foods include such companies as Dean Foods and General Mills, Kellogg’s and Cargill, although you might not see their names on the labels.

Consider: Cascadian Farm, the maker of organic frozen fruits and breakfast cereals, was snapped up by General Mills when it bought a company called Small Planet Foods. But shoppers will not find General Mills’ name or logo on a box of Cascadian Farm cereal. They’ll find Small Planet Foods.

Nor will you find the Kellogg’s name on a package of Bear Naked’s granola, even though Kellogg’s acquired Bear Naked when its Kashi division purchased the company. Indeed, Bear Naked’s Web site provides reams of detail about the company’s history, worldview and its commitment to the environment. Its timeline, though, omits the November 2007 buyout.

“The large companies go to great lengths to hide that they’re the owners,” Potter said from his company’s headquarters in Clinton, Mich. “There’s a great deal of effort that goes into shielding that from the public. There’s smoke and mirrors in the marketing of organic foods.”