The potato is Ireland’s staple crop, and at the beginning of the 20th century the Emerald Isle had the highest potato consumption per capita in the world. Now a sweet potato grower in Sims, NC, is selling those sweet potatoes to Ireland.

Kristi Hocutt, sales manager at Triple J Produce Inc. in Sims, has begun selling its sweet potatoes to Ireland, Holland and the United Kingdom.

“Europeans view the sweet potato as a super food, a healthy food, and they value it for that,” she said in an interview. “The sweet potato in Europe, in my experience, has gone from an exotic food to an everyday, mainstream food.”

Last year, Triple J exported 388,000 pounds of sweet potatoes. For 2015, the goal is 6 million pounds. Hocutt and her husband, Joey Hocutt, president and produce grower at Triple J, recently traveled to Berlin to boost export sales. Kristi Hocutt also attended the recent Canadian Produce Marketing Association show in Montreal and soon will visit London.

Kristi Hocutt with John B. Emerson, U.S. ambassador to Germany, at the Fruit Logistica produce show in Berlin, which drew 65,000 visitors from 135 countries tin February. Triple J plans to boost 2015 export sales of its sweet potatoes by 15 times the 2014 total. Triple J ships organic and conventional sweet potatoes year-round from its 100,000-square-foot packingshed, which has 12 heated and cooled storage rooms. Triple J is a third-generation, family-owned business operated by Mike, Jay and Joey Hocutt. Its largest crop is sweet potatoes, with 1,300 acres of conventional and 150 acres of organic. Triple J farms about 4,800 acres, including tobacco, wheat and soybeans, along with other produce such as asparagus, squash, red and white potatoes, and a variety of peppers.

Last year, Kristi Hocutt noted, a rain-reduced 2013 sweet potato crop in storage ran out when the 2014 harvest was late due to weather. Triple J had 55 workers for the harvest under the federal H2A worker program and did not complete its sweet potato harvest until Nov. 18. The shortage reduced exports in 2014. Hocutt hopes to increase exports to 6 million pounds in 2015.

The American Sweet Potato Marketing Institute helps Triple J and other sweet potato growers in this country market their produce abroad, Hocutt said. The institute, with offices at the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission in Benson, NC, has received $200,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to promote U.S. sweet potatoes in western Europe.

The USDA funds will be used for generic promotion of fresh and processed sweet potatoes. The one-year promotion started July 1, 2014. Funding for an additional year is being sought. The institute represents growers in North Carolina, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Export sales of U.S. sweet potatoes reached $95 million in 2014 and skyrocketed by 80 percent in recent years, with about 20 percent of the North Carolina sweet potato crop exported via container ships on a 10-14 day journey to 19 countries, mostly in Europe. Sue Johnson-Langdon, head of the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission, predicted that exports can double over the next five years.

For Triple J, its 2015 goal of 6 million pounds represents a fifteenfold increase over 2014 exports.