North Carolina is the nation’s leading grower of both sweet potatoes and tobacco, and two or possibly three new facilities opening Sept. 30 and in the second quarter of 2015 will build on both products to create new markets for farmers. The new companies will be located in Farmville and Nashville, and possibly Goldsboro, in eastern North Carolina where about half of U.S. sweet potatoes are grown.

The plants will produce dried sweet potatoes — sliced, diced or ground into flour — and juices that will compete in the $60 billion global health and wellness beverage market, the $143 billion U.S. healthy foods market and the global pet food market, expected to reach $74.8 billion by 2017.Sue Johnson-Langdon, executive director of the N.C. Sweet Potato Commission poses at its offices in Benson, NC, with chips, triscuits, pancake mix, baby food and other sweet potato value-added products that have expanded sales. The U.S. grows less than 1 percent of the world’s sweet potatoes, one analyst asserted, but imports have raised food-safety concerns that make U.S. domestic production more competitive.

An estimated 60 percent of North Carolina’s sweet potato growers also grow tobacco. There are about 1,800 tobacco farms in the state, employing 30,000 workers picking 400 million pounds of tobacco a year.

The original idea behind the facilities, first hatched in 2011 by researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, is that farmers could use sweet potatoes as a crop in tandem with tobacco.

Sue Johnson-Langdon, executive director of the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission in Benson, NC, said the new facilities will allow Tar Heel growers to compete with Chinese imports used in pet food and animal feed produced in the United States. She estimates that 25 percent to 30 percent of the sweet potatoes grown here are not harvested, or are culled out during processing because they are too big, too small or misshapen.

“The dehydration facilities will provide a value-added process that enables the entire sweet potato crop to be sold and used,” Johnson-Langdon said. She noted that value-added processes have improved sweet potato sales since 2001, as sweet potato chips and fries were added, along with microwaveable sweet potatoes, sweet potato vodka and beer, and even a sweet potato health drink.   

Carolina Innovative Food Ingredients operations in Nashville will be managed by Universal Leaf North America, a tobacco company subsidiary. John W. Kimber assumed duties in February as chief operating officer. For the past 13 years he was project manager of the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission Foundation in Benson, where he secured and managed $2 million in public grants.

CIFI is a business-to-business operation, and has no plans to offer its own consumer products, Kimber said in a Sept. 15 interview. The company plans to start operations in the second quarter of 2015, spending $19 million over the first two years on new state-of-the-art facilities and hiring 64 employees when full production is reached.

Natural Blend Vegetable Dehydration LLC in Farmville, NC, will be managed by Ham Produce Co. in Snow Hill, NC. It will begin operations with an opening ceremony Sept. 30. Ham Produce will invest $12 million over next three years and create 57 jobs with average annual salaries of $38,123 plus benefits (average annual wage in Pitt County is $33,769, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce).

"Since we bought the Farmville facility in 2009, it has been our goal to bring jobs back to Farmville," Stacy Ham, vice president of Ham Produce, told The Produce News in an interview.

The potential operation in Goldsboro is still in the planning stages at Lansing Trade Group in Maumee, OH, and officials there declined to say when or even whether it would be launched. Lansing buys and sells commodities including whole grains, feed ingredients, energy products and freight in North America and internationally.