August 2015 — New NCGT partner Pate Dawson-Southern Foods has been making efforts to source locally for years, according to Director of Marketing Joel Sullivan. 
Sullivan is the fifth generation of his family to work in the business, which started out as a grocery store in Goldsboro. “We’ve always sourced locally, especially produce, from NC farmers, it’s just a way of doing business. It’s important to us,” he explains. What the company needed, however, was a way of connecting with more local producers that they could do business with.
Pate Dawson, which for years served a customer base of mostly Eastern family-style restaurants, acquired Southern Foods in 2010. Along with Southern Foods, they acquired an expanded clientele of fine dining establishments — many of which were looking for local products — as well as a “cut shop” processing facility for meat and seafood. “The processing infrastructure enables us to really customize what we cut for our customers. Everything is cut by hand by skilled cutters, not by machines. It’s the only facility of its size in the region,” says Joel. The Greensboro facility employs about 40 people and includes a fish room, meat room, grind room, and local cheese area.
The Taylor Fish Farm family. Photo courtesy of website.
In partnering with NC Growing Together, Pate Dawson-Southern Foods has been able to connect with more small and mid-scale producers looking to do business. One such example is Valee Taylor of Taylor Fish Farm in Cedar Grove, NC. Joel met Valee at the NCGT annual meeting in January 2015. Valee, a Tilapia producer with multiple buyers including Whole Foods, was looking for a processor to fillet his fish in order to expand his product line. The two “connected the dots”, as Joel puts it, and within a month Valee was delivering his fish to the Greensboro cut shop for processing. “Our cut shop facility can be a resource to other producers or fish houses who just need a processing partner,” says Joel.