March 2015 - Mike Burris, who served as the Director of Produce for 27 years at Merchant"s Distributors, Inc., the Hickory-based grocery distributor that online casino is a sister company to NCGT partner Lowes Foods, has a new role, focused specifically on increasing the amount of locally-grown North Carolina produce distributed by MDI. "I"ll be [...]
February 2015 - One of the biggest challenges facing local small and mid-sized producers and large-scale "mainstream" buyers (grocery chains and wholesale distributors) is how to move smaller volumes of source-identified product from farm to point-of-sale at a price that keeps everybody along the supply chain in business. NC Growing Together is working to develop and [...]
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 [...]
November 2014 - Developing profitable distribution models in a local food economy isn't always easy. Just ask Josh Cave, the Facilities Manager at Pilot Mountain Pride (PMP). Based in Surry County, PMP was founded in 2010 as a way for farmers to diversify their incomes and as an economic development tool for the county. The [...]
November 2014 - Last month we invited you to see the inner workings of a produce distribution center. Now, 2013-2014 NC Growing Together Supply Chain Fellow Sebastian Naskaris has created two new walkthrough documents that show how meat moves through the supply chain with the same step-by-step explanation and helpful photos. Process Walkthrough: Direct-Store Delivery (DSD) [...]
September 2014 - If you've ever wondered how produce moves through a distributor's warehouse, Process Walkthrough at a Regional Produce Distribution Center will answer your questions with step-by-step detail and helpful photographs. Photo by Sebastian Naskaris. Produced by 2013-2014 NC Growing Together Supply Chain Fellow Sebastian Naskaris, the document is designed to introduce produce [...]
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, [...]
April 2014 - The NC Growing Together project is working to support the development of Food Hubs as a promising way to address the aggregation and distribution challenges of moving local products into mainstream markets. On April 11, NCGT arranged for Pilot Mountain Pride (PMP; a Winston-Salem area Food Hub) and TRACTOR (an Asheville-based food [...]
