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 - 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 [...]
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 - NC Growing Together is partnering with NC Farm Bureau, NC State University Department of Horticultural Science, and NC Cooperative Extension to offer the Farmer Idea Lab, a new "Lunch-N-Learn" webinar series designed to offer farmer-to-farmer sharing of success stories and lessons learned. The first webinar, Farm Smarter Not Harder, was held on February 5. [...]
The refridgerator unit is clean and the lighting is good. You can clearly read the labels on the packaging. The prices are prominently displayed and you can see the brand. The meat being sold in this section is locally produced at the Henry and Nina's farm in Granville County, NC. January 2015 - [...]
December 2014 - NC Growing Together is sponsoring student teams at NC State Poole College of Management's Supply Chain Resource Cooperative and Consumer Innovation Consortium that are addressing pressing business and supply chain issues. In the Fall 2014 semester, one of three sponsored teams examined a hot topic among North Carolina's food business entrepreneurs and food hubs: [...]
December 2014 - Over the past two years, NCGT and Lowes Foods have worked in partnership to connect producers and store managers to bring more authentically homegrown North Carolina products into Lowes Foods stores. Now the company is adding eggs to the mix. Demand has varied across the five stores that piloted the first direct-store-delivery [...]
November 2014 - The NCGT Local Food Infrastructure Inventory is a mapped inventory of businesses that serve as intermediary steps in local food supply chains. This includes value-added processors, fresh produce wholesaler/distributors, multi-farm CSA"s, food hubs, community kitchens, incubator farms, and cold storage locations. "It"s a great guide for new farmers," says Henderson County extension [...]
Wanchese Fish Company in Wanchese, NC. Photo by Dr. Garrity-Blake. September 2014 - In September, NC Growing Together released Keep It Moving: North Carolina Seafood Transportation Logistics with a Focus on East to West Routes. The report, by Dr. Barbara Garrity-Blake of the Duke University Marine Laboratory and Megan Ware of Duke University"s [...]
August 2014 - On Saturday August 23, Fort Bragg held its first local farmers' market. Timed to coincide with the popular monthly 5k walk/run sponsored by the Fort Bragg MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) office, the market featured four farmers selling a variety of fresh produce and value-added products. The impetus to start an on-base [...]
