How Asheville food brands make it to supermarket shelves

When Isabelle George started selling her handcrafted hummus at the River Arts District Farmers Market in early 2022, she had no inkling that within two years she’d see it sharing space with national brands on Earth Fare’s cold-case shelves. But that progression, she says, happened quickly and organically. 

Having recently moved to Asheville, George started regularly visiting area tailgate markets for both the social scene and the food. “I was trying to meet new people, so I was just like, ‘Well, I can sell hummus,’” she recalls. “My mom and I had kind of perfected our family recipe.”

Word spread quickly about George’s lemon-forward Sitto’s Hummus, which is inspired by her Lebanese grandmother, Norma George. (“Sitto” is a Lebanese word for “grandma.”) Soon she was also vending at the North Asheville Tailgate Market, and local retailers who tried her product began expressing interest. 

“I wasn’t really going to make this a full-time gig,” says George, then a special events manager. “But I felt that it was very serendipitous and that I should kind of roll with it.”

She dipped a toe into wholesale waters through a partnership with local grocery delivery service Mother Earth Food. From there, she began working with a handful of small brick-and-mortar businesses, including Marked Tree Vineyard’s downtown tasting room.

Strong sales at Marked Tree’s Asheville location and its vineyard in Flat Rock persuaded her that it was time to take the next step of approaching a supermarket. She decided on homegrown Asheville chain Earth Fare and contacted a purchasing manager to set up a meeting at the store to share samples of her product. The hummus sold itself, she says, and is now being marketed at the grocer’s Asheville and Greenville, S.C., locations. 

George is part of a large and growing community of Western North Carolina business owners whose entrepreneurial dreams have come true on supermarket shelves. But from packaging and food safety to marketing and distribution, makers with high hopes of someday seeing their crave-worthy creations displayed in grocery aisles have to tackle much more than just developing an excellent product.

Local food businesses say there’s plenty of elbow grease, relationship-building and a learning curve that go along with the rewards of partnering with grocers. And retailers as well as community organizations have their own roles in supporting fledgling enterprises.

Pathways to success

The first step to initiating vendor partnerships with supermarkets, George says, is just putting yourself out there and setting up meetings. But she stresses that the process varies depending on the product, the department it will be sold in and the company a business is approaching. 

“Every store is different and will have different expectations of you as a vendor,” she says.

For Ginger Frank, founder of Poppy Hand-Crafted Popcorn, grocers weren’t part of the business plan when she first launched as a tiny retail shop on the second floor of North Asheville’s Merrimon Square shopping center in 2014. At the time a single mom with two young kids, she was focused on building a neighborhood enterprise that could support her small family and allow her to do a bit of fundraising for local schools.

“I thought about doing some corporate gifting and really just serving the customers who came in the door and ordered from us online,” says Frank. “I didn’t really have a wholesale model in mind at all.”

Fast-forward a decade, and Frank’s brightly colored bags of flavored popcorn are not only a ubiquitous sight in gift shops and supermarkets around Western North Carolina and the Southeast but can be found on retail shelves from coast to coast across the U.S. From grocers, including Whole Foods Market, Ingles and The Fresh Market to Ace Hardware and Williams-Sonoma — even Buc-ee’s gas stations — her little homegrown brand has blown up just like its non-GMO popcorn kernels. 

The rapid growth of the company, which is transitioning this summer from the Black Mountain property it’s inhabited for the past five years into a new $4.3 million, 45,000-square-foot production space on Gerber Road, was partially facilitated by COVID-19, says Frank. Though Poppy had evolved into doing wholesale before 2020 — its very first account was Asheville Community Theatre — pandemic market shifts helped usher the product into supermarkets, starting with Greensboro-based The Fresh Market.

After being forced to shutter her retail space and losing about 90% of her wholesale customers because they were also closed, The Fresh Market reached out. “It was like a gift,” she recalls. “I hadn’t really considered it, but they wanted to place a big order, and we had popcorn to sell.”

Whole Foods followed quickly after that, she says, and as the pandemic wore on, grocers became Poppy’s bread and butter. Today, Frank still nurtures relationships with small-scale retailers — roughly 90% of the 2,000 stores that sell Poppy products are independently owned — but working with grocery chains has proved to be key to the brand’s advancement.

“We’re so grateful to the people and [small retail] stores that have helped us grow,” she says. “But we know that’s kind of a limited market, and if we really want to give opportunity to our employees, we have to continue to grow. And for a food company to do that, you have to move into the grocery world.” 

Juggling act

Frank says the urgency of the pandemic prompted the grocers she was working with to temporarily streamline their vendor onboarding, making it relatively painless for Poppy to make the shift. But she and George both say they encountered a learning curve when making the jump to working with supermarkets.

“Typically it’s kind of a long process of communicating with grocers with all kinds of paperwork and decision-making,” says Frank.

And the time and money involved in checking grocers’ boxes for packaging, labeling, food safety certifications and more means food businesses have to stop and consider their long-range goals before making that transition. 

“We’ve had to really learn how to run as a food manufacturer rather than a small popcorn business,” Frank says. “I think I’ve kind of learned that you have to either stay small and be happy staying small, or you have to really go for it. There’s not a whole lot of room in between.”

George, whose hummus business is still mostly a one-woman show, says her background in events coordination has been helpful in her efforts to go bigger. “There are so many things to keep top of mind,” she says. “Making sure your inventory is stocked, making sure you have all your ingredients and your boxes, that your labeling looks good, then prioritizing, like, what’s the next piece of equipment I’m going to buy.”

Scaling up to get her product supermarket-ready involved a lot of online searches and phone calls. She had to piece together the web of regulations and needs, including state inspections, labeling rules (“You need to write ‘keep refrigerated’ on it, even though, I’m like, ‘Isn’t that obvious?’” George says with a laugh.), how to create barcodes — separate codes are needed for each product flavor and container size — and much more.

Then there is the matter of packaging. One of the main requirements, says George, is that containers be sealed and tamper-proof. But another consideration is how the packages will look and perform on the shelf. Stackability is important, as is the customer’s view from the aisles. 

At first, George was only labeling the lids of her hummus containers, but after discussing it with Earth Fare staff, she realized that when looking at the cold case, shoppers could only see the clear sides. “With Earth Fare and with my local vendors, I can get constant feedback, and that’s really helpful,” she says.

To market, to market

Supporting small-scale local business owners new to the grocery market is the top priority of Dustin Kennedy’s job as senior forager for local and emerging brands at Whole Foods Market. Based in the Raleigh area, Kennedy’s team works with food businesses throughout the Southeastern U.S., including North Carolina.  

“The most important thing when brands are approaching us is for them to know that the grocery industry is a very competitive space,” Kennedy says. “They need to know their product, their customer and their community well, and they should have a strategy for their brand before looking to get on shelves.”

The starting point for entrepreneurs, he says, is to read up on the company and get to know its quality standards. From there, they can submit information on their product through the Whole Foods’ online supplier portal for review.

True to his job title, Kennedy and his team also actively search within communities and on social media for local products. Contenders should be innovative, distinctive in their category and fit well within the customer’s local culture, he says. Sustainability and ethical sourcing are additional considerations.

“We aim to reflect the surrounding community within the four walls of our stores,” says Kennedy. “Our customers love that they can discover new and exciting products from their local communities in our stores.”

For many WNC food businesses, the West Village Market & Deli is the first steppingstone on the path to supermarket partnerships. Owner Rosanne Kiely launched the small, independent grocery downtown in the Grove Arcade in 2002, relocating it to its current home on Haywood Road in West Asheville in 2009. 

Throughout its history, the market has offered countless budding brands a bridge between tailgate market tables and supermarket shelves, including such success stories as Lusty Monk mustard, Mandala Chocolate and Asheville Tea Co. Kiely estimates that the store currently offers about 140 WNC products. 

Other than making sure items align with West Village’s non-GMO requirement and contain as many organic ingredients as possible, aspiring vendors find very little red tape. Kiely starts off stocking a small quantity of a new brand to see how it sells, then increases orders depending on demand. 

“We just give them a space on the shelf and really encourage them to come in and do tastings so people can taste [the product], meet them and hear their story,” says Kiely. “We’ll give almost anybody an opportunity.”

Support systems

Making the decision to grow by partnering with a distributor is where things can start to get really complicated for small food businesses, says Kiely. “Some people get invited to do that or even search it out and don’t realize how much it’s going to change their world,” she says. “The big distributors start to ask you to cut your prices a bit and to provide a bunch of freebies for specials and things like that, so there’s an awful lot of lost margin.”

Kennedy says that with Whole Foods, suppliers are welcome to start out self-distributing, but as their products spread to multiple stores, they are encouraged to work with a distributor.

Despite Poppy’s broad reach, Frank has always shipped most orders directly to her customers and only began using distributors when regional and national grocery store partnerships developed. George still hand-delivers all her orders but sees a distributor as the next big step for Sitto’s Hummus. 

She’s clear, though, that before making such a move, she will need to scale up with more equipment and some employees and create a financial cushion through loans or grants.

“You don’t want to take on a purchase order that you can’t fulfill monetarily, because you have to upfront a lot of the costs before you get paid — maybe a month or two months later sometimes,” she says. “So you have to make sure that you can order all that packaging and all those ingredients and everything and survive.” 

George found help in navigating the confusing landscape of moving to wholesale through the Western Women’s Business Center, an Asheville-based program of the Carolina Small Business Development Fund. She was paired with a Mountain BizWorks coach who helped her polish her business plan and determine solid next steps for funding her growth.

As a community development financial institution (CDFI), Mountain BizWorks provides training, technical assistance and funding to startups, which are often turned away by banks, says Noah Wilson, the organization’s director of sector development. But he points out that another essential support is peer mentorship.

“Once you’ve gotten past startup, there’s this kind of valley of death when you’re scaling up your operation,” he says. “Our department is focused on the ecosystem that surrounds businesses and making sure there are very good networks of industry peers.”

To this end, Mountain BizWorks sponsors the Asheville Area Food Guild, which Wilson says is one of the largest such business groups on the East Coast. Open to all food and beverage manufacturers in North Carolina’s 25 westernmost counties, the guild connects members to resources, offers regular networking and educational events and helps promote peer-to-peer relationships.

“People appreciate having folks who understand their world and will talk to you and you can benefit from their experience,” he says. “But I think part of what that community is all about is ensuring that our brands in this region — especially the small ones who are really creative — are able to grow at a sustainable pace but are also able to manage rapid growth for good and make it work for them.”

Kitchen space

Wilson adds that independent grocers like West Village Market and the larger French Broad Food Co-op play a vital role in incubating young businesses, because “the learning curve is gentler with the smaller shops, and they can give you good feedback.” And, likewise, some corporate supermarket chains, such as Ingles, Earth Fare and Whole Foods, have programs in place to encourage emerging brands. 

Kennedy of Whole Foods says his company’s Local and Emerging Accelerator Program (LEAP) launched in 2022 to offer mentorship and tailored educational opportunities. LEAP has two cohorts: Early Growth, for aspiring Whole Foods vendors; and On the Verge, for current suppliers carried in limited stores but poised for expansion. 

Also critical to the success of small food enterprises with grocery store ambitions, say Wilson, Kiely and George, is adequate access to commercial kitchens. George rents her own kitchen space in Darë Vegan Cheese’s Weaverville production facility but says such arrangements are rare and highly sought after by food makers. 

“You can rent per hour with some spaces around town,” she says. “But I’ve definitely lucked out with this situation because if I get a last-minute, larger order, I can pop in and out as I please.”

Blue Ridge Food Ventures has been supporting WNC food entrepreneurs with kitchen infrastructure, equipment and other services since 2005, both Kiely and Wilson note. Wilson also mentions the newly opened WNC FoodWorks facility at the WNC Farmers Market, which he says is very much “incubator scale” with its two commercial kitchen spaces, equipment (such as ovens, mixers, blenders, fillers, etc.) ongoing educational offerings and consulting services.

Since launching last October, WNC FoodWorks has worked with more than 50 clients and currently has 30 active users, says manager Matthew Shimko. Most of those clients are currently selling at tailgate markets and events, with grocery stores still on the horizon. 

To champion that growth among the smallest enterprises, WNC FoodWorks offers tiered pricing. “If a company is a pure, noncash-flow startup, we start them off at lower rates and work up to our full hourly kitchen rate over their first year of operation to give them time to get their company going,” Shimko explains. “As they grow, I’m sure they will be stocking [grocery store] shelves shortly.”

George, who has just conquered that milestone, is focused on slow growth and savoring the new thrill of having her hummus in supermarkets. “It’s really gratifying,” she says. “Seeing them in the wild is very surreal.”

Frank says that with Poppy’s expanding capacity, the company has been working on partnering with more grocery stores while trying not to get ahead of its production capabilities. Though she’s much further along in her entrepreneurial journey than George, Frank still feels exhilarated when she encounters her popcorn in a supermarket aisle. 

“I find it superexciting,” she says. “Especially when I’m outside of Asheville somewhere and I just stumble upon it.”

PULL QUOTE: “I think I’ve kind of learned that you have to either stay small and be happy staying small, or you have to really go for it.” — Ginger Frank, founder of Poppy Handcrafted Popcorn