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Tagged: Charlotte Regional Partnership

Business
5:02 am
Mon December 10, 2012

Eat Local? Try Locally-Processed Food

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Credit Julie Rose
A feast of foods (and antacid!) processed in the Charlotte region.
Credit Julie Rose
Ruth's Salad was founded in Charlotte 50 years ago. Today the company's pimento cheese, coleslaw and other salads are available in grocery stores throughout the South.
Credit Julie Rose
Ruth's Salads are packaged in cups bearing the same logo the company had when it started 50 years ago (shown here by General Manager Bill Rudisill).
Credit Julie Rose
Ruth's Salad has about 30 employees in its two kitchens near Uptown Charlotte.
Stefano Foods relocated its Italian specialty food business from Long Island to Charlotte in the mid-1990s.
Credit Julie Rose
Stefano Foods Vice President of Sales and Marketing Alan Hamer in the company's test kitchen.
Credit Julie Rose
BestSweet CEO Richard Zulman and an assortment of lozenges, supplements and antacids his company manufactures in Mooresville.
Credit Julie Rose
20 million cough drops roll off BestSweet's machinery each day.
Credit Julie Rose
"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." BestSweet makes chewy supplements that taste like candy.
Credit Julie Rose
BestSweet in Mooresville makes hard candy and lozenges for some of the biggest brands.
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To "eat local" typically means dining on fresh produce, meat and dairy from nearby farms. But WFAE's Julie Rose discovered another way to "eat local" that is a thriving industry in the Charlotte region.

The Charlotte Regional Partnership estimates there are more than 200 companies processing food locally with some 15,000 employees and $5 billion in yearly sales.

Let's dine on the fruits of their labor.

First to the meat counter. Perdue and Tyson have huge poultry processing plants in our region.

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