US: Business heats up for chile growers

The chill and chile aroma hit you as soon as you step into the processing and storage area of the massive new Bailey Farms Inc. facility. It's 48 degrees indoors. Workers stand at conveyor belts, hand-packaging boxfuls of the colorful, spicy fruit for rapid fork-lifting to the loading docks.

Sales seem to be sizzling. Bailey Farms distributes more than 25,000 cases a week, which company president Randy Bailey equates to be roughly 400,000 pounds. The distribution link spans from Maine to Florida, with the list of clients including Wal-Mart, Food Lion, Harris Teeter and Lowes Foods.

"If somebody is specializing in one thing, they should be the best at it, versus a full-line supplier which has a hundred items they try to sell you," Bailey said. "And we've grown [our business] from that."

The public gets a chance to see the operation firsthand at a ribbon-cutting event at 3 p.m. today at the $2.65 million distribution center. It's located off Knotts Grove Road at Oxford Industrial Park and near the Interstate 85/U.S. 15 interchange.

"We needed to expand for a long time," Bailey said. "And the only way to do it right was to start from scratch. We had added on and added on to the other place [at the family farm off U.S. 15 at the Tar River community]."

How large is the new processing facility? Bailey estimated the electricity bill is going to be about $4,000 a month. Should the power supply go out, an emergency generator is ready to start.

"We'll deliver chile peppers -- rain, sleet or snow," he said with a smile and a laugh. Bailey Farms has about 65 employees, five tractor-trailers and three smaller vehicles. In the summertime, there also will be 100 pickers.

The company packs and distributes peppers picked from about 1,000 acres of fields, including from the family land at Tar River and from growers locally and in Florida. It's also trying to move into the gourmet hot sauce business.

At the enterprise along with Bailey, 38, is his wife, Debbie, 34, a Durham native and the company vice president. Each has a spacious office in the building, completed a few weeks ago. Debbie Bailey said she doesn't see herself as a corporate executive.

Asked what advice she would give women who aspire to be business leaders, she said, "It's a lot of hard work and it takes a lot of time. You've got to be willing to put forth the effort and the time."

The couple has been married for a decade. Debbie Bailey met her future husband at Tony's Gym in Butner, where she was working at the front desk. He was an operator at the Butner water plant in addition to being a farmer.

After the wedding, she worked for a time as a receptionist at Duke's Oncology Clinic before joining Bailey Farms. "I've done it all," she said of becoming a chile farmer. She's delivered to grocery stores and picked in the field.

There's a family feel to Bailey Farms. Debbie Bailey's 70-year-old mother, Sylvia Murdock, works in a cubicle as an accounts receivable specialist. She was a secretary -- off and on for about 35 years -- with Duke Medical Center.

"It's called job security," she said of being in proximity to Debbie Bailey, the younger of two daughters. "She knows if she gets rid of me, then her daddy and I move in with her." Debbie Bailey's well-fed, female yellow retriever, Dixie, freely roams -- and takes naps on -- the executive floor and greets seated visitors by raising a paw. There's an aquarium across from her desk.

The company's roots can be traced back to Randy Bailey's late father, Durham County native Thomas L. Bailey III. The older Bailey farmed tobacco in the early 1960s and changed the land to a pick your-own-strawberry farm. Squash and tomatoes soon followed, but the farm was bankrupt by the end of the 1980s.

Randy Bailey reacquired some of the equipment and with his father started Bailey Farms at the beginning of the 1990s. The older Bailey retired from his position as superintendent of Durham's water treatment plant and devoted more time to farming.

Randy Bailey, on the company's Web site, notes that when he was a teenager, one of his friend's parents, originally from Mexico, educated him about spicy foods.

And whenever he visited their home, "They always treated me to excellent spicy dishes and salsas," he writes. "I was quickly hooked, and when my father and I started our new venture, I decided this was the crop I wanted us to grow and market."

The timing was good, he adds. "This decision came at a time when the appeal of chile peppers in culinary circles began to increase in popularity and the Hispanic migration infiltrated this region."

Source: heraldsun.com