FAISON, NC— Nature’s Way Farms here is expanding again, doubling down on sweet potatoes with a $2.5 million new facility with three all-new packing lines. The new four-room facility, located next to the company’s headquarters and current storage and packing building, will have 120,000 square feet of packing and sweet potato storage space.

Mark Crawford, president of Nature’s Way Farms, said the new facility will give the company an additional 32,500 total square feet of refrigerated sweet potato storage space. “Of course, we are constantly moving potatoes into storage and then shipping them out,” he noted, “so the total we can handle in the course of a year is much higher.”

Mark Crawford, president of Nature’s Way Farms, and Murray Crawford, founder and chief executive officer of the firm, stand in the new storage and packing facility under construction in late August. The new facility, delayed about three months by a wet spring, was expected to go into operation Oct. 1, Crawford said in mid-September. He is big on the future for sweet potato sales, and predicts Nature’s Way Farms will expand its volume of the product by 25 percent in the year ahead. The company has growers under contract in North Carolina that supply it with sweet potatoes.

The new building will be state-of-the-art, with automated heating, cooling and humidity control. It will have packing lines that can sort potatoes by diameter, length, shape and ounce. Overall, the automation in the new building will reduce the number of employees required by 25 or 30 workers, despite the increased volume, Crawford estimated. The sales team, which includes an office in Chesapeake, VA, will remain the same, he said.

The packing lines will produce two-, three-, five- and 10-pound bags of potatoes, tray packs, 40-pound boxes, and microwaveable sweet potatoes and russet potatoes. A third specialty packing line will produce the Nature’s Way Farms Steam It! line of 1.5-pound bags of four kinds of potatoes — fingerling, red, sweet and gold — that cook in the microwave in eight minutes inside their plastic film bags. Steam It! potatoes debuted in August and require special washing, sizing and drying before they are bagged and sealed by heat. Water for the new facility will come from six-inch, all-natural wells drilled on the grounds.

Nature’s Way Farms supplies wholesalers, foodservice distributors and retail chains in 10 states and the District of Columbia up and down the East Coast, from Boston to Jacksonville, Crawford told The Produce News. “The new Steam It! line has surpassed our company’s expectations and has been received very well in the marketplace,” he added.

Nature’s Way Farms began as a brokerage operating in 1979 out of the utility room in the Faison house of Murray G. and Ann Crawford. Murray Crawford is owner and now chief executive officer of the company (and father of Mark Crawford). In 1982, the firm added packaging and shipping operations, and in 2002 became Nature’s Way Farms.

Best-selling product for Nature’s Way Farms is russet potatoes, Murray Crawford noted. It also sells avocados, cabbage, carrots, melons, onions, peppers, tomatoes, turnips and a full line of tropical fruits year-round. The firm is fully integrated, handling growing, packing, shipping and sales, Crawford observed. Nature’s Way Farms also packs private-label potatoes and onions for several chains and foodservice companies, many out-of-state.

Last year, Nature’s Way Farms donated more than 1.84 million pounds of produce to the Society of St. Andrew, making it the leading donor to the society’s Carolinas office, which provides produce for agencies serving needy families in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.