ROXOBEL – Thanks to our love of those luscious legumes – the All-American peanut – a vacant building here is about to receive new life.

When Governor Pat McCrory announced last month that the North Carolina Rural Infrastructure Authority (RIA) had approved 31 grant and loan requests across the Tar Heel state totaling $10.4 million, one would include a Bertie County retail business.

One of those grants, in the amount of $100,000, will go to support the re-use of a pair of 25,000 square foot former furniture and auction warehouses at Cemetery Road and Church Street in Roxobel that had been sitting vacant.

But come the fall of 2016, one of the buildings will become the expanded home of Baker’s Southern Traditions, a local peanut processing company; and the building’s renaissance will also bring with it eight new jobs.

Baker’s Southern Traditions are a business off-shoot of Baker Farms, a Roxobel farming operation dating back four generations.  The Baker family farms some 2,500 acres in Bertie County, 450 of those are used for growing peanuts: the large Virginia-type redskin variety that North Carolina is famous for.  Of that amount of acreage, about 100 acres are used for the individual consumer merchandising business.

Salted, unsalted, Cajun, chocolate, and cocktail nuts along with peanut brittle are just some of the peanut fare sold at Baker’s Southern Traditions.

“Over the past few years we’ve shown a remarkable amount of growth,” says Danielle Baker, CEO of Baker’s Southern Traditions. “Thanks to our distributor, our products are now available in over 200 stores. We had outgrown our current facility, and we knew we had to expand.”

The Building Reuse Program will be part of Bertie County Economic Development Executive Director Steve Biggs report to the County Commissioners at their monthly meeting on July 5.  Biggs and his office were some of the first people Baker contacted about the auction house.

“He started talking to me about the various grants that were available,” she said, “and this particular grant came up and caught our eye because there was money available to be used for new businesses in town.”

The program provides grants to local governments to renovate vacant buildings, renovate and/or expand buildings occupied by existing North Carolina companies, and renovate, expand or construct health care facilities that will lead to the creation of new jobs in Tier 1 and Tier 2 counties and in rural census tracts of Tier 3 counties.

Baker said in her grant application she had to mention how the expansion would create more jobs in Bertie County.

“We met all the criteria for that,” she noted, “and we’re proud to say it will create jobs in Bertie County – guaranteed.”

Originally constructed in 1984, upgrades to the building will include wall installation, electrical, plumbing, HVAC and flooring due to its age and having sat unoccupied now for over seven months.

The Baker family discussed building a new brick-and-mortar structure at their Tyler School Road location, but then found out about the auction house and applied for the grant.

“We decided to go with that because we felt it would give us room for future growth,” Baker continued. “At the rate we’re growing we expect to be expanding more.”

Much as modernization has fueled the growth of Baker’s Southern Traditions, they still want to rely on local foot traffic.

“We love to have the locals come in,” she insists, “but 90 percent of our business now is what we ship to other locations.  That allows us to offer some other things in Roxobel and it opens new avenues.”

Most of the employees at Baker’s are women and that’s helped with maintaining the local flavor.

“It’s really just worked out that I’ve hired women,” Baker states. “They’ve been single moms, breadwinners in their households, students paying for college, or single people just making their way.  We’ve got some people who’ve left Bertie County and wanted to come back. We feel like we provide jobs for people who want to stay here.”

Baker feels being a female CEO can present its own unique circumstances, not all of them challenging.

“It gives you opportunities to showcase what women can do,” she said. “We have great ideas and we’ve also always been great multi-taskers. All of that goes hand-in-hand in front of a business, so we bring a lot to the table, and we certainly have a lot to offer when we work with men; and that’s what we’re all about.”

Baker says there’s a definite timeline they hope to follow as far as meeting the time-table for their grand opening.

“We’re planning now to open on October 1, so we can be up and running for the fourth quarter, which is our busiest season,” she maintains.

To meet inventory, Baker says her company sometimes has to contract with other producers other than Baker Farms; but primarily they use their own family product.

“That’s part of our niche when we started, is that we’re able to tell our customers and consumers: ‘We follow the process from growing the peanut all the way through to your table’,” she stressed.

In addition to the expanded home of the retail business, Baker has already attracted another tenant: a much-needed branch of the Albemarle Regional Library for western Bertie County will also be occupying the new space.

“I appreciate everything everyone in the county has done,” Baker concluded. “Even though we’ve been in business at our family farm for 10 years we’re looking forward to what we can bring to Roxobel, because we think it’s going to be something that’s really positive.”

Baker says any others that may be interested in leasing space at the Roxobel facility can contact her through her through Baker’s Southern Traditions’ retail business.