Eggs, honey and pasture-raised meat: the local producer guide

Every Charlotte grocery store has a “local” section now, and most of what’s in it comes from somewhere in the Carolinas, which is a big place. This guide is about the producers within a real drive of the city: the egg farm that’s been in Monroe for a century, the butcher in Lake Wylie, the market with a rule about how far a tomato can travel. Where we state a fact about a business it comes from that business’s own listing or site. Where the directory has gaps, and it has a few, we say so.

Eggs

Simpson’s Eggs in Monroe has been family owned and operated since 1925, according to its site, on a farm of more than 215 acres. The scale is the story: in 1969 the farm had 25,000 birds; today its poultry capacity is 1,375,000 hens. That’s not a backyard flock. It’s a commercial egg operation that happens to be a century-old family business in Union County, and the eggs in a lot of Charlotte grocery cases come from here. If you want to know where your eggs come from, this is one of the few local answers that’s true at supermarket scale.

Smaller pastured-egg producers sell at the farmers markets rather than through a website, which is why they’re not in the directory yet. The market below is where to find them.

Meat

Meat Mafia Steaks in Lake Wylie sells what it calls high-end, restaurant-quality cuts, ordered online for easy pickup. Its tagline is a steak you can’t refuse. It’s a butcher-shop model built for the way people actually shop now: browse at night, pick up on the way home. Our read: this is the place to buy for a dinner where the steak is the whole point.

For meat that’s cooked for you, The Smoke Pit in Concord butchers its own meat in house before smoking it for up to 18 hours, which puts it closer to a producer than most restaurants. And Juneberry Ridge in Norwood is a farm and event destination serving what its site calls home-grown cuisine, with walking paths, cabins and meeting rooms; it’s an hour east and it’s the closest thing the region has to a farm you can stay on.

The market with a rule

The Mount Holly Farmers Market was started by the Mount Holly Community Development Foundation in 2006 and follows what it calls a 75-75 rule: vendors must be farms within 75 miles that produce 75 percent of what they sell. That rule is the whole reason to trust a farmers market. Without it, a “farmers market” can be a reseller with a truck. With it, the person behind the table grew the thing. The market also runs a kids club, takes SNAP with Double Bucks, and has live music and cooking demonstrations. If you’re serious about buying local, this is the standard to hold every other market to.

Josh’s Farmers Market in Mooresville is the other big one on the north side; it’s not a single business in our directory, but Cottage Grove Bakery sells there most Saturdays and is a good reason to go.

Restaurants that buy from farms

Clover Harvest in Clover, South Carolina, says it’s supported by more than a dozen local farms and purveyors. In a town of Clover’s size, you can ask which ones and get a straight answer. Front Porch and Provisions in Dallas is a restaurant and general store built on locally sourced products, which means the shelves are the producer guide; walk in and read the labels. The Pump House in Rock Hill describes its Southern menu as locally sourced. A restaurant that names its farms on the menu is doing the work for you.

Flowers, plants and the pick-your-own farm

Not food, but the same customers. McLawland Farms is a working farm inside Charlotte with pick-your-own flowers, farm stays and flower-arranging classes. Metrolina Greenhouses in Huntersville, founded in 1972, is the largest single-site heated greenhouse in the country at more than 160 acres, per its site. It’s wholesale, so you can’t shop there, but a large share of the annuals sold at big-box stores across the Southeast were grown 20 minutes north of Uptown. That’s a local producer most people have bought from without knowing it.

Honey, and what’s missing

Honey is the gap in this guide. The metro has plenty of small beekeepers, and they sell at the Mount Holly market, at Josh’s and at the Saturday markets in Matthews, Davidson and Waxhaw, but almost none of them have a website, which is why none are in the directory. Buy honey from whoever is at the market; it’s the one product where “local” measurably matters, since the flavor comes from what’s blooming within a couple of miles of the hive. If you keep bees and sell, list yourself. It’s free for small producers and we’d like to fix this section.

The wholesale side is worth one line: Rodriguez Produce in Monroe distributes fresh produce with what it calls the biggest fleet on the East Coast. If you run a restaurant, that’s who to call. If you run a kitchen at home, the market is still the better answer.

How to shop local without wasting a Saturday

Go early; the good eggs and the honey are gone by 10. Ask where the farm is; a real producer will tell you the road. Bring cash and a cooler. And check the shopping directory for farm stands and markets by town, since new ones open every spring. Know a producer we’ve missed? Send the name.