Planning Guide for Small Business Center – Cooperative Extension Collaborations

Small Business Centers (SBCs) in North Carolina have a unique ability to help farmers and food businesses create viable business plans to increase their share of the local food market. This guide explains the benefits and steps to collaborating with SBC’s to introduce the two courses, The Business of Agritourism and the Business of Organic Certification.

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NC Growing Together Local Food Supply Chain Apprenticeship (2018)

NC Growing Together’s Local Food Supply Chain Apprenticeship is an exciting 8-week program that gives apprentices the opportunity to work with local food hubs, businesses and organizations and gain hands-on training related to local food systems and value chains work.

Strategies to Increase Sales of Local Meat at Farmstands and Small Retailers (2018)

This guide outlines a few key strategies to increase the sales of local, pasture-raised meat at independent, small-scale grocery retailers, and retail farm stands.

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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.

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Stand-alone Fresh Produce Cross-docking Facility

Food Hubs – defined by USDA as “a centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products” – have become a popular strategy considered by local government jurisdictions (e.g., municipalities, towns, counties) to build a local food economy. Research indicates that these entities need a minimum of $1 million in annual sales to break even. This team’s goal was to consider a food hub alternative that provides only the aggregation and storage functions for produce, with marketing and distribution costs arranged directly between grower and buyer. The hub charges per-case and pallet for cold and freezer storage and rents out production equipment as a secondary income source. The team created a spreadsheet proforma cost model, based on the experiences of a food hub in North Carolina, that can be utilized by others to estimate the feasibility of such an operation.

Student Teams Poster Presentation

Proforma Spreadsheet Cost Model

Sourcing Local Tomatoes to Minimize Food Loss

Team: John Evans, Randi Meyer, and Audrey Sherk / Spring 2018

In most locations, the availability of a fresh local vegetable or fruit is limited to a few weeks. Yet the demand for local lasts all year. Couple this with the fact that within those few weeks there can be an oversupply of product, which often goes to waste. This team worked with the Ashley Christensen Restaurants’ commissary kitchen in Raleigh, NC, to examine the economics of sourcing all the tomatoes for cooked products needed by the restaurants from 100% North Carolina sources.

The team created a cost model to examine the effectiveness of purchasing, preparing, and storing the tomatoes for use during the year. Purchasing 100% seasonal North Carolina tomatoes in season reduces the restaurants’ cost by nearly one-half, will likely reduce on-farm food loss, and keeps their purchasing local.

Download Poster | Cost Model