Local Food Supply Chain Apprenticeship
NC Growing Together’s 2018 Local Food Supply Chain Apprentices and their mentors.
NC Growing Together offered summer Local Food Supply Chain Apprenticeships from 2015-2018.
Apprentices dedicate 40 hours per week for an 8-week period with one of the nine mentoring organizations. The apprenticeship is paid and some travel (outside of home to duty station) is included. Each organization is looking for specific skills, but overall apprentices should have an interest in local food systems and agriculture and should have some experience in agriculture, business, marketing, or a related field.
NCGT aims to bring more locally-produced foods into mainstream retail and wholesale markets, strengthening the economics of small to mid-sized farm and fishing operations and their communities. One of the main activities is to work on the intermediary steps in the supply chain, including aggregation, processing, and distribution, to understand and remove barriers that may prevent local foods from entering large-scale markets. Apprentices work to carry out this mission by working with their mentorship organizations.
Click here for descriptions of 2018 apprenticeships at Freshpoint Inc. (Raleigh-Durham), Working Landscapes (Warrenton), Farmer Foodshare (Durham), Feast Down East (Burgaw), Firsthand Foods (Durham), TRACTOR Food and Farms (Burnsville), Piedmont Food and Agricultural Processing Center (Hillsborough), Lowes Foods (Winston-Salem), and Foodbuy (Charlotte).
Local Food Supply Chain Apprenticeship: A Program Guide
The NCGT Local Food Supply Chain Apprenticeship is both a way to educate and engage the next generation of food entrepreneurs and policy makers, and a strategy to support the success of value chain intermediaries. This guide summarizes our planning and execution of the apprenticeship program between 2015 and 2018. We hope it will be useful to university programs or other organizations seeking to educate and build stronger ties between local and regional food businesses and supporting organizations such as land grant universities.
The Local Food Supply Chain Apprenticeship was offered from 2015 to 2018. Learn about our Apprenticeship alumni by clicking the links in the menu below.