A Rocky Mount entrepreneur is translating career and life lessons into an impactful produce operation.
To start a business, you need to be adaptable and resilient. You need mentors and relationships. That describes Will Kornegay, who runs a produce business in Rocky Mount. Kornegay, 38, gained experience working for one of the state’s largest sweetpotato companies. He then picked a tough time to go out on his own, just before the pandemic. He survived, and the business is growing.
Kornegay’s Ripe Revival supplies vegetables and fruit to supermarkets. The problem with produce is that as much as 40% is left in the fields because of imperfections that won’t meet retail specifications.
Kornegay wanted to use all of it. You can process much of that 40%, including slicing and dicing it into products that groceries will buy. The rest can go to folks struggling to put food on the table, which gets to his social impact goal. He started Ripe for Revival, a non-profit affiliate, with a bus that went around as a pay-what-you-can mobile market. Now he has five buses.
In September, Ripe Revival won a $1.9 million grant from the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs to fund a 50,000-square-foot facility in Nash County capable of processing 660 million pounds of produce a year. The town of Nashville has agreed to sell him 55 acres to develop an Innovation Campus. The goal is a $10 million project over the next decade that will create 25 new jobs, with a workforce development center, retail market, event pavilion, amphitheater trails and lodging.
His operation is four connected enterprises, including the nonprofit. Ripe Revival Produce is helping farmers sell 100% of their crop. Ripe Revival Market sells and delivers weekly subscription boxes of local produce and meat direct-to-consumers. Ripe Revival Provisions aims to create new consumer packaged goods.
Tater training
Kornegay graduated from Rocky Mount Academy, then earned a business degree at NC State in 2009 and worked as an energy trader in Cary. “I loved commodities,” he says. “I just didn’t love what I was doing and living in the big city.”
After a couple of years, he joined Ham Farms, based in Snow Hill. He was hired to do sales, but what he did was a little of everything, from driving a forklift to running the packing line. “I learned a lot about operations,” says Kornegay.
If you want to start your own business, work for a good company and learn from smart people. One of those people for Kornegay was Bobby Ham, an East Carolina University graduate who came back to his family’s farm in the 1970s and grew it into one of the top growers in the Southeast.
North Carolina, the leading U.S. sweetpotato state, had an opportunity to develop international markets, but needed folks like Kornegay to get on planes and build out distribution.
Calling himself “very lucky,” he helped Ham’s business land UK grocery giant Tesco “as one of my first customers in the sweetpotato world.”
He also gained crucial experience with a couple of ventures. He started a business in 2015 called the Sportsman’s Box, a subscription-based concept. Every month, outdoor enthusiasts would receive a box of hunting and fishing gear. After two years, he sold the business.
Then he helped run a company called Glean, which took edible produce that didn’t meet retail specifications and turned it into flour that could be sold to consumers. “We were taking the leftovers, the ugly stuff that nobody wanted, and repurposing it.”
In 2019, he launched Ripe Revival. The plan was to create gummies made from sweet potatoes. He had a $250,000 grant from the Kroger grocery chain, which was staking which was staking innovative companies committed to reducing food waste and hunger. And then everything changed. “You remember that little thing called COVID?” he says. Retailers told him they weren’t taking on new suppliers.
He had a decision to make. “Do I crawl back to my former employer and ask for my job back, or do I just keep figuring it out?” He figured it out.
Kornegay built an online subscription food box service. “Within two weeks, we had 500 members that we were delivering produce to during the pandemic, and produce turned into meat and milk and eggs.”
The government encouraged this model, enlisting big produce companies to pack tens of thousands of boxes for home delivery. “So I got the contract from one of the big produce companies to pack 50,000 boxes in this building, … Which kept us alive.’
“Then the food bank heard about what we were doing, and they hired me to come in and buy 7 million pounds of food and deliver it to their agencies for six months during the pandemic,” Kornegay says. This all set the foundation for Ripe Revival and
its nonprofit.
Ripe relationships
“This whole brainchild of Ripe Revival came from the education I got at Ham Farms,” says Kornegay. “Bobby Ham created the model of vertical integration that allowed him to use every sweetpotato that he grew. He didn’t waste any of them. He had the produce company, he had the puree plant, he had a dehydration facility, and he had a sweetpotato vodka facility.”
“He’d pick up every potato that was in the field, and processed every single thing. I started looking at the impact that it had on the bottom line and realized this works. This is the solution that all these farmers don’t have.”
While existing nonprofits try to help folks who couldn’t afford enough food, Kornegay learned there was a need for specialists in logistics, food safety and distribution. “And I said, I think I’ll start a nonprofit that does this and does it well.”
Ripe for Revival is expanding into culinary education, teaching how to prepare food and to grow produce. On the Friday of Christmas week, Kornegay’s operation, with help from 75 volunteers, packed 2,500 boxes of food for families in need.
One of Kornegay’s key skills is building and sustaining relationships. His farming partners in nearby Whitakers are high school buddies Billy McDaniel, Peyton McDaniel and Phillip Watson, who supply some of his produce. The town of Nashville bought into his vision, selling him land for his expansion at a good price. He developed relationships with the companies that donated meat and produce for the Christmas boxes, including Wilders, House of Raeford and Villari Foods, Nash Produce and L&M Produce. About 30 nonprofits and faith-based partners agreed to distribute the boxes. The Merrimon-Wynne House, a special events venue in a historic downtown Raleigh property, has chosen Ripe for Revival for its annual event to fundraise for a nonprofit. The goal is $150,000.
It has been a tough slog to get to this point. “The last five years, we’ve had to pivot to survive, four or five times, to be able to continue operations. Failure led to a different venture, led to a different domain, led to a different opportunity, led to this ‘Aha, here’s how I tie it all together.’ And that’s the Innovation Campus that we’re about to embark on.” ■