Navigating Your Food Business: A Success Series in 2026 Series Introduction Webinar March 24, 6-7:30pm, Zoom This session is your direct roadmap to the resources available in North Carolina and future education opportunities in this series. Insights on Process Authority and laboratory services Introduction to food regulation in North Carolina Who is available to help [...]
The grant work will focus on two types of unharvested produce: cosmetically imperfect (does not meet USDA #1 standards for scarring, size, or shape, but is otherwise edible); and produce that meets USDA #1 standards but is left in the field because harvesting costs exceed the market price of the produce. Figuring out how to "recover" this otherwise wasted produce can both improve growers' bottom line and make our food system more efficient and sustainable..
Graham Givens May/June 2016 -- The Center for Environmental Farming Systems' Supply Chain Scholars are creating connections between business and local food systems work. Graham Givens and Kaitlyn Sutton are both MBA students at NC State University's Jenkins Graduate School of Management. As Supply Chain Scholars, they are looking at ways to build [...]
FreshPoint's Dan Batchelder explaining grading requirements to a producer at a recent Postharvest Handling workshop. April 2016 -- NC Growing Together is bringing together small-scale farmers and food service and retail buyers for capacity-building along the local food supply chain. Events such as Grower-Buyer Mixers and Postharvest Handling Workshops provide opportunities for peer-to-peer [...]
June 2015 -- Over the past four years, NC State Horticulture Science PhD student Drew Marticorena has been studying the "Local Multiplier Effect", the economic ripple effect that occurs within a community when consumers spend their money at independent, locally-owned businesses. While there are databases that contain standard multipliers used by economic developers across [...]
June 2015 -- The NC Growing Together Summer 2015 Local Food Supply Chain Apprentices are on the ground and ready to get started on their 8-week assignments! Meet them below: Josie Walker is from Trenton, NC and is currently an Agricultural and Environmental Systems student at North Carolina A&T University. She will be working [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
