local-food
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John Dyke Bet His Life Savings on Ugly Tomatoes
Before Nashville had a local-food boom, a former medical salesman opened a neighborhood grocery and learned the business one farmer, one customer and one costly mistake at a time. Twenty-five years later, he still stocks the produce aisle.
Patrick Mateer Put the Farmers Market in the Freezer
A 6:30 a.m. farmers-market shift showed him the absurdity hiding in plain sight: beloved local fruit, a brutally short selling season, and good harvests with nowhere to go. His answer was a regional cold chain built to make summer last all year.
How Murphy Hospitality Group Turned One Island Into a Hospitality Flywheel
The Murphy family started with two people doing every job in one PEI restaurant. Four decades later, their cleverest product is not a steak, a suite or a pint - it is the way all three sell one another.
Seal the Seasons Put the Farmers Market in the Freezer - Then Had to Reinvent Its Own Factory
The North Carolina startup began with an $80,000 prize purse and its own freezing line. Its bigger idea arrived when it stopped trying to own the factory and turned spare capacity on family farms into a regional frozen-food network.
What Chefs Want!
A one-van produce hustle in Louisville turned into a 16,000-restaurant food-distribution machine by doing the one thing the national giants would not: picking up the phone and asking the chef.
Gotham Greens
Gotham Greens is a Brooklyn-born indoor farming and fresh food company that grows pesticide-free leafy greens and herbs year-round in a national network of high-tech hydroponic greenhouses. Founded in 2009, it opened the first commercial rooftop greenhouse in the United States and has since scaled to more than a dozen facilities across nine states, producing roughly 100 million heads of lettuce a year using up to 90% less water and 97% less land than conventional field farming. Beyond greens, the company sells branded salad kits, dressings, dips and cooking sauces to more than 6,500 retail, restaurant and foodservice locations nationwide.