Happy Dirt champions North Carolina organic produce
Happy Dirt champions North Carolina organic produce
Happy Dirt offers a full line of organic vegetables and seasonal fruits grown on the East Coast, including a year-round supply of organic sweet potatoes and greens.
The company, which was founded in 2004 as Eastern Carolina Organics and rebranded in 2019 to its current name, services customers in the Southeast, working with large and independent retailers, co-ops, buying clubs, restaurants and more.
Later this month, a group from Happy Dirt’s team will be headed to SEPC’s Southern Innovations show.
“For local shows like this, it’s all about connecting with the farmers that we work with regionally that we don’t get to see too often,” said Alex Borst, purchasing manager for the Durham, NC-based company. “We’re looking forward to seeing local customers. It ends up being a cool show because so many of our customers — both large retailers and smaller mom and pops — go to the show.”
The Happy Dirt team will be at booth No. 625 and are currently taking meetings with people to plan ahead for the show.
“A lot of people enjoy coming by our booth because it’s so bright and very unique, different than most of the booths there,” said Taylor Meadows, marketing manager for Happy Dirt. “We typically showcase produce from our North Carolina farms with the Happy Dirt label. We use our booth as a conversation starter.”
Once attendees stop by, Happy Dirt’s team uses it as an opportunity to talk about new programs and what’s trending.
“Our company has grown pretty tremendously since 2020,’ Borst said. “We brought on a lot of retailers since then, but we still have a lot of room to grow. Our goal in going to this show is to leave with new business — regional or non-regional companies that want to move our product.”
Meadows added that the growth for Happy Dirt has been around 20 percent annually over the past six years.
“Another goal at the show is to talk up our North Carolina farms,” she said. “In the summertime, a lot of retailers want to support local, and we want people to know we have that. We want to continue to make people aware of what we have in North Carolina.”
Happy Dirt has experienced some challenges in recent months, but it’s not expected to impact its continued growth.
“It’s been a rough summer, not so much for us as a company, but for some of our local farmers,” Borst said. “The weather has been rough in North Carolina and up and down the East Coast with a lot of very wet periods where it’s not traditionally that wet, and also extreme heat.”
As of late August, things were starting to tick back up again and the company is really strong into its hard squash, winter squash, summer squash and muscadine, with sweet potatoes on the horizon in September.
“We’re excited and we think it’s going to be a good year on sweet potatoes,” Borst said. “The last couple of years have been rough, and this year has been much better, so we’re excited to see how yields look.”
Happy Dirt works hard to ensure its customers get what they want, and their growers are up for any challenge.
“A lot of times farms are relying on us to give them a blueprint as to what they should be putting into the ground,” Borst said. “Our gold standard is finding partners who can give us some rough planning estimates and then work with farms to achieve those goals.”
In addition to its North Carolina season, when things start to slow down in the winter, Happy Dirt turns to Florida, working in partnership with Lady Moon Farms.
“Anaïs Beddard, whose father started Lady Moon, will be at the booth with us for the show,” Meadows said. “We love when our farm-partners can join us.”
