BusinessTN

It's hard to say which was more unexpected, the feverish development of biofuels, or the fact Wal-Mart is now a major player in the organic foods market. Both instances suggest the immense changes transforming the agricultural industry, from farmer to food processor, which are of great consequence to an agrarian state like Tennessee. Spurred and funded by the 2004 buyout of numerous Tennessee tobacco farmers, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture is capitalizing on those changes with an entrepreneurial incubator in Wilson County.

The facility is not another high-tech, energy-oriented laboratory trying to design a new engine that runs on shallots or some such. No, it's something more fundamental.

Awash with $200,000 in state and federal funding, Lebanon's Cumberland University recently opened the nearly novel 2,400-square-foot Cumberland Culinary Center. State Rep. Stratton Bone secured most of the funding from the tobacco buyout. So, one of the primary directives of the center is developing options for former tobacco farmers left without their signature crop.

"We're trying to give these people an idea of what to sell," says Kitchen Manager John Cook.

Cumberland's Paul Stumb, however, believes the nonprofit center will best serve as an entrepreneurial economic incubator. The dean of the Labry School of Business & Economics says food entrepreneurs short of cash and connections can produce their products and find assistance developing a sustainable business strategy for promotion, packaging and distribution at the new Cumberland facility, which will eventually evolve into a significant revenue generator. Through the state's Pick Tennessee Products initiative, Stumb believes the Culinary Center will increase Tennessee's farm and agribusiness, create markets for Tennessee farm products and raise brand awareness of Tennessee products.

"The center is designed primarily to support three constituencies," Stumb explains. "First, the local entrepreneur who created a recipe and wants to commercialize it; second, the local farmers--particularly produce farmers; and third, the students.

But the most significant impact will be on the local entrepreneurs."

Some may scoff at the earnings potential of a culinary center in bucolic Tennessee, but in the world of food entrepreneurs, multimillion-dollar enterprises are launched everywhere from suburban kitchens to country shacks. Ben and Jerry learned how to make ice cream from a correspondence course, and with a few thousand dollars and an empty gas station, they built an empire. However, there are examples that are more recent. Take current Food Network darling Billy Thomas, who founded Lynchburg Cakes and Candy Co. in his back yard two years ago. And now, Cook says Thomas just secured a distributor in China to sell his signature Whiskey Balls to the largest population on the globe. There is no telling where the next Stone's Smokehouse and Meat Market or PotatoFinger Snack Foods is going to come from. Both are million-dollar enterprises that started small and, with enough help, managed to overcome the treacherous markets where they live, just as Sue Sykes did.

Sykes gets credit as the motivating entrepreneur behind the Culinary Center. Sykes' Tennessee Gourmet company already produces myriad products, ranging from pepper jelly to barbecue sauce, which she cooks in what are essentially time-share situations at industrial kitchens around the region, a costly element in the production model. Sykes generates six-figure annual revenues retailing in boutiques as well as Austin, Texas' multibillion-dollar Whole Foods Market. Tapping into an industrial kitchen situated on a major Interstate will give her equal footing to compete with million-dollar revenue generators, she says.

Sykes' increased competitiveness will have a direct impact on local food growers.

"The problem for a Tennessee farmer," Sykes says, "is processing the products to create the 'value-added' element." In short, they can grow peppers, which do well in this clime, but they can't process them into what Sykes uses to make pepper jelly, a stimulating regional condiment that moves fairly well, especially in travel venues like the state's international airports.

For the farmer, the center can reinforce brand awareness.

"Farmers are growing brand loyalty," says Dan Strasser, the director of marketing and development at the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. "Locally, you already hear people refer to the particular person they get their produce from as 'my farmer.'"

That brand loyalty should grow across the state when the next two facilities open. Strasser says that the Wilson County Culinary Center is the first, but others in East and West Tennessee should follow. There are only two similar venues in the region, one in rural East Tennessee and one in North Alabama--neither, Sykes explains, with agreeable access.

Currently, close to three dozen firms are interested in either working out of the center or contracting work through it, Cook says. A sizable minority of the companies are located out of state, he says, as far afield as New York and the Midwest.

The Culinary Center won't reshape the agribusiness landscape like biodiesels, but who can say that products like Sykes' pepper jelly won't take off nationally, turning acres of former Tennessee tobacco farms into little pepper patches? Did anyone really expect two guys who took a correspondence course to become ice cream moguls?