Ayden is a Pitt County town of around 5,100 in the heart of the Eastern North Carolina farm belt, off the NC 11 bypass between Greenville and Kinston. You may know it for the Skylight Inn BBQ restaurant, with the iconic silver dome (“Choppin’ since 1947”). You may have attended the Ayden Collard Festival in September, which was started up in 1975, canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic, but back again this fall.
Like many small towns, it has been working hard to boost the local economy because nothing comes easy in rural North Carolina.
The news is that the General Assembly has agreed in the new state budget to provide $4 million for the Eastern North Carolina Food Commercialization Center in Ayden. It will take another couple of years of hard work, and a federal grant, to get it built and running. It will be an $8.8 million project when all is said and done, including funding for the first three years of operations.
I talked to the folks who have been working on this, and it is a good example of how local people can make something happen. They have had help, but the folks in Ayden have been working on this for nearly a decade. When it opens, possibly in 2023, it could help generate and attract 150-200 jobs, which is a significant number for Pitt and surrounding counties.
Plans call for a 24,000-square-foot building on 2.65 acres the county is donating that will provide food processing services for farmers, food manufacturers and entrepreneurs in a seven-county region. What this means is this: Maybe your grandmother had a great recipe for marinade, which you can make in small batches and sell at the farmers’ market. But if you want to scale that up and try to get into grocery stores, you can’t make it in your kitchen. You need industrial-grade equipment – big ovens, vats, packaging lines – compliant with food safety regulations.
“That takes expertise,” says Brad Hufford, vice president of business development at the Greenville Eastern North Carolina Alliance, who has worked on this project since he was an economic developer and planner for the town of Ayden. “You need professionals.” For entrepreneurs, the facility would lease out space and access to specialized food processing and packaging equipment, because, in Hufford’s words, “they aren’t going to want to front all that cost on a hope and a dream.”
Many small food companies need a facility where they can run proof-of-concept batches, where they can create five pallets of product. Likely, the center will have an anchor tenant in maybe 5,000 square feet, and the rest of the building will be rented by businesses for the time they need space and equipment. One of the biggest needs that small companies have is in packaging, says Hufford, who has deep family roots in the town. (“My mother was raised in Ayden.”)
And larger companies could use the facility to experiment with new products, which is what happens in a similar operation in Michigan. “When Kellogg’s wants to create a new product, they don’t want to shut down their lines to run a pilot. They go to that facility and rent space to run a test batch,” says Hufford.
“We want to be useful to as wide a group as possible.”
Keeping the money here
Food manufacturing has become one of the state’s top agricultural priorities. We grow a lot. Agriculture and ag-related businesses make up the largest sector in North Carolina’s economy, at nearly $93 billion. But we have been leaving money on the table. “So much of our product is processed out of state,” says Ron Fish, the agriculture department’s assistant director for agribusiness.
The state set a goal of recruiting more food manufacturers to come here, and to support more local startups to keep a greater share of the food dollars here.
That is why the state added a food processing recruiter, Mary Lesa Pegg, at the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, and why there’s a North Carolina Food Innovation Lab in Kannapolis.
“I was down there last week with a client who flew to the U.S. from Japan,” says Pegg, “because they’re interested in learning more about the facility. It really is an impressive facility.” She listed recent wins for the state because of the food manufacturing focus: Red Bull coming to Cabarrus County with its partner, Rauch; Meel, a frozen food company, coming to Granville County; Crump coming to Nash County, so the pet treats business could be close to North Carolina sweet potatoes.
The state’s focus on supporting food manufacturing can be traced to the study that think tank Battelle did for N.C. State and the ag department seven years ago. It projected that if the state executed the food manufacturing plan, it could add 38,000 jobs and $10.3 billion to the economy.
“That’s when a lot of this stuff really kicked off,” says Fish. “There’s a lot of things in food that feed into the final product, and we’re trying to expand as much as possible.”
The high school idea
In Ayden, they didn’t know a decade ago that they wanted to do a food project. They just wanted to do something. They initially went to the federal Economic Development Administration for funding to help convert an old high school to use for community college continuing education classes.
EDA came back with a challenge. “They said ‘That’s too small. You’re thinking too small,’” says Hufford. “We only fund things that are job creation. Go back and really think about your assets.”
So Mayor Stephen Tripp and Hufford and others talked to people in the region and at N.C. State and East Carolina University up the road, and gradually the idea of a food commercialization center took shape. It would focus on the fruit and vegetable side, and let others do meat.
A look at the folks who have helped along the way provides some insights into the network from the universities, state and regional agencies, and industry that is available to rural communities. You hear this, but it is real. If there is a good idea and local people are committed to it, there are experts who will pitch in. Small towns aren’t alone.
On the center’s board, besides Mayor Tripp, Hufford and Ayden Town Manager Matt Livingston, are David Mayo from ECU’s Miller School of Entrepreneurship, and Stacy Ham Thomas, vice president of Ham Farms of Snow Hill, a major sweet potato grower. Keith Wheeler, executive director of ECU’s Office of National Security & Industry Initiatives, is on the board. He is also a member of the board of the North Carolina Global TransPark down the road in Kinston. Keith Purvis, owner of Greenville Produce Company, has served as the project manager so far. The Mid-East Commission, a regional group, is helping the town prepare its EDA application.
That last group is significant because the Mid-East Commission is an example of organizations that are important to rural counties and towns. Preparing grant applications is time-consuming and requires expertise. Rural communities often don’t have that capacity, and so projects stall. The center’s fate depends on getting $4 to $5 million from the EDA to match the legislature’s allocation.
Even as the financing is being lined up, said Livingston, hard work remains to refine the center’s plans.
“We’re going to get quite a bit of money,” says Livingston. “We’ve got to get it right.”
In building the case for the EDA, the group has gotten letters of support from companies who say, “I wish I had this facility today. I need it today. I need it yesterday,’” says Hufford. If they had a building now, they could have accommodated a startup launched by N.C. State students who are developing technology for food processors, a business that may end up in Ayden yet.
And that’s part of the case for a new food manufacturing facility in the East, because few industries are trying to innovate as quickly as food. New products are showing up on the shelves.
“It’s technology that’s driving a lot of things in the food industry,” says Livingston, “just like it’s driving everything else. The ability to do with food what we couldn’t do before – make it more nutritional, make the shelf life longer. All these things are innovating so rapidly, it does make it very complex and it does add a whole ‘nother step to it.”
