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The Mount Olive Pickle Company is an American food processing company located in Mount Olive, North Carolina. The company's primary product is pickled cucumbers, but it is also a large supplier of pepper, mixed pickle, relish, and other pickled products. Mt. Olive is the largest independent pickle company in the United States and top-selling pickle brand in the Southeastern United States, where its market share approaches 70 percent.〔http://www.mtolivepickles.com/mtolive101/our-history/〕〔Mohan, "Mt. Olive Packs and Prints Pickles and Peppers," ''Packaging Digest,'' September 2005.〕 Facilities are all located in Mt. Olive on with of production, office, and warehouse space. The company has in excess of 1,200 brining vats and can store over of cucumbers. The company employs over 500 year round and swells to over 800 during the busiest intake season each summer. In 1943, the company was one of the first in the country to offer profit sharing plans to their employees. In 1959, Mt. Olive established an employee community fund that helped support local community organizations.〔http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/471/entry〕 ==History== In the mid-1920s, Shickrey Baddour, a Lebanese immigrant from nearby Goldsboro, first saw opportunity in the wasted cucumber crops of area farmers. Baddour came up with the idea of buying the cucumbers, putting them in a brining tank, and selling the brined cucumbers, or brine stock, to other pickle firms. Baddour enlisted the aid of George Moore, a sailor from Wilmington who had worked in a Castle Hayne pickle plant. The plan didn't work the way they had envisioned, however: they had no buyers for their product. By January 1926, a new plan was put into place through the efforts of a group of Mount Olive business people who formally established the Mt. Olive Pickle Company, Inc. to pack and sell its own pickles. Thirty-seven original shareholders put forward $19,000 in capital to get the company started in what all viewed as a "community proposition." The board of directors hired Moore as factory superintendent and Baddour as salesman and gave them each shares of stock for their initial investments. The board also purchased of land from farmer J.A. Westbrook for $1,000. The land is part of the current manufacturing site today. Westbrook's home still stands across from the plant.〔 Mt. Olive surpassed $500,000 in sales in 1942. The company initiated a profit-sharing plan in 1943 and by 1947 its sales reached more than $1 million a year.〔''Growing An American Tradition,'' Mt. Olive Pickle Co., 2006.〕 In 1973, Mt. Olive food scientists, working in cooperation with researchers from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), discovered one of the secrets of fermentation. The Mt. Olive and USDA researchers discovered that the bacteria ''L. plantarum'' was key to the fermentation process, and that purging carbon dioxide from brine with nitrogen led to minimal rot and waste.〔Etchells, et al., "Factors Influencing Bloater Formation in Brined Cucumbers During Controlled Fermentation," ''Journal of Food Science,'' 1975.〕 In 1986, Mt. Olive Pickle co-founded the North Carolina Pickle Festival.〔"Thousands Turn Out for N.C. Pickle Festival," ''Goldsboro News-Argus,'' April 29, 2007.〕 In 2005, the Mt. Olive plant had expanded to take up more than of production space covering .〔 In 2008, the company introduced the first single-pack pickles. The intended markets are workers and schoolchildren. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mt. Olive Pickle Company」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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