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Purple Pride: Stokes sweet-potato butter is marketed under Land of the Saura label
Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman
Stokes Purple Sweet Potato Butter is high in calcium and antioxidants.
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Published: October 21, 2009
Updated: 10/20/2009 08:05 pm
People in Stokes County have always taken pride in their agriculture. Now they have a little more to make them proud.
The source of that pride is the Stokes Purple, a patented variety of purple sweet potato that's unusually high in antioxidants. It's also used in Land of
the Saura (named after the Indian tribe) sweet-potato butter that's sold in select Whole Foods Markets.
A few years ago, Mike Sizemore, David Priddy, their wives and a few partners formed Saura Pride, a company that contracts with Stokes farmers to grow the purple sweet potatoes, as well as regular orange ones. They also set up a processing company called Stokes Foods Inc.
Sizemore said that such a specialty product came along just at a time when Stokes farmers were making less and less off tobacco.
"The main reason we started this was to save farmland," he said. "I've had more than one farmer say he makes about twice as much growing the sweet potatoes as tobacco."
Stokes Foods started selling the whole potatoes to Whole Foods Markets this spring. The company also developed a puree, primarily designed for restaurants. Then they decided to sell sweet-potato butter based on a recipe by Gail Greene, the wife of a sweet-potato farmer.
Stokes Foods contracted with Bill Cobb, a former small-business counselor at Forsyth Technical Community College, to market the products. Now, Cobb, Larry Weston and Tony McGee have put together a licensing company for the brand name Land of the Saura.
Saura Pride gets the potatoes, Stokes Foods gets them made into puree or butter, then Cobb markets it under the Land of the Saura label.
"There are so many barriers for farmers and small entrepreneurs to reaching a commercial market," McGee said. "We realized that marketing is the missing piece here."
Weston is a consultant and McGee is the executive director of StokesCORE, a nonprofit organization that promotes economic development. StokesCORE has been involved in efforts to turn the Camp Sertoma 4-H Center into a conference center, and Forsyth Tech has already started using it as a satellite campus.
Though the sweet-potato butter is currently being made by Da'Vine Foods in Elizabethtown, McGee hopes that Stokes will one day have a commercial kitchen that small, local manufacturers can all share.
The story of Stokes Purple goes back a few years. An Asian woman at the N.C. State Fair gave an unusual sweet-potato plant to some Stokes farmers. Sizemore asked N.C. State University to analyze it. They found it was high in calcium and antioxidants, which increased with cooking.
Unfortunately, tests also detected a virus that set the plant down a path toward extinction. But with some selective breeding, N.C. State researchers developed a virus-free variety that still had all the nutritious qualities of the original plant.
And that's how Stokes Purple was born.
The Stokes Purple potatoes are in Whole Foods throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. Whole Foods carries the sweet-potato butter in Winston-Salem, Duluth, Ga., Nashville and Memphis, Tenn. It's also sold at Priddy's General Store in Danbury. The butter costs $9.99 for an 18-ounce jar.
Like apple butter, the sweet-potato butter is flavored with nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice. "The great thing about it is you can use it not just as a spread for bread, but as an ingredient in pies and other things," Cobb said.
He said that chefs at Whole Foods have used the butter in a salad dressing with balsamic vinegar. It's also good for stirring into oatmeal. "My favorite thing is to take a bagel, put some cream cheese on top and then a ring of (sweet-potato butter)," Cobb said.
Cobb said that he and McGee hope to use the Land of the Saura brand for other products.
"We're trying to establish a brand of products that have a certain consistency in what they are about -- products that are natural and from this region," Cobb said.
For more information, visit www.stokespurple.com.
mhastings@wsjournal.com
727-7394
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