February 2015 – Food distributor Cornucopia Cheese & Specialty Foods Company was founded in 1980 in the back of a community grocery store in rural Alamance County. It is now one of the leading cheese and specialty food suppliers in the Southeast, providing over 1,000 products to customers in North Carolina, Virginia and surrounding states. Working with NCGT, Cornucopia is opening markets for North Carolina cheese producers, selling local cheeses to US Foods, one of the country”s largest food distributors.

“US Foods operates at a massive scale, and its vendor setup requirements are really time- and cost-prohibitive for local creameries. Smaller specialty distributors, like Cornucopia, fill a vital role in the supply chain between small/mid-scale and massive. Cornucopia can open markets for local  producers by becoming the conduit to US Foods and creating a way for creameries to cost-effectively sell their products to US Foods and its customers,” explains John Day, NCGT Development Lead for Dairy and Proteins, who connected Cornucopia with US Foods.

“We”ve been buying [and distributing] local cheeses for a long time”, says John McHugh, Cornucopia”s Vice President. “Originally, we wanted local cheeses because our competitors didn”t have them. It started with selling a few pieces of cheese to white-tablecloth-type chefs who were ahead of the curve. Then, as the local food movement grew, producers grew, and as there was more demand, the supply came on line. And it took off from there”, he explains.

In addition to their long-standing cheese accounts, Cornucopia now sells about best online casino one thousand pounds of cheese monthly from Goat Lady Dairy in Climax, Ashe County Cheese in West Jefferson, and The Cultured Cow Creamery in Durham to US Foods, which in turn sells them to restaurants and institutional food buyers.

As demand for local foods increases across the country, McHugh is happy to be based here in North Carolina. “North Carolina is really, really special because there”s such a wealth of great local products here”, he says.

NCGT is looking for small and mid-sized distributors that could act as links between smaller producers and very large scale buyers, such as NCGT partner US Foods. For more information please contact John Day, NCGT Development Lead for Dairy and Proteins, or Trish Tripp, NCGT Development Lead for Produce.

This article originally appeared in the February 2015 NC Growing Together Newsletter.