August 2014 – NC Growing Together has released a guide entitled Wholesale and Retail Product Specifications: Guidance and Best Practices for Fresh Produce for Small Farms and Food Hubs.
The manual was developed to assist individual growers and grower-based distributors and food hubs by outlining a clear set of descriptive guidelines for quality, size, labeling, packaging and USDA grade classification for select fresh produce. The manual also provides guidance on how to improve the presentation of produce in the marketplace in order to enhance sales to retailers and wholesalers.
In response to producers’ requests for historical market prices, NCGT also digitized prices for the years 2008 through 2013 for the products in the manual, recording Thursday wholesale prices at the Raleigh Farmers Market as reported by the NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ Market News daily reports.
The historical pricing data can be downloaded here: http://www.cefs.ncsu.edu/ncgt/raleigh-fm-wholesale-prices.xlsx
Graphs of the last three years of prices are here:
http://www.cefs.ncsu.edu/ncgt/raleigh-fm-price-graphs.pdf
The full guide can be downloaded from NCGT’s website under Resources for Producers.
This article originally appeared in the August 2014 NC Growing Together Newsletter.