350 people have jobs at the Gaston County plant; a frozen-fruit plant is on hold

Dole Food Co. on Wednesday opened its $54 million salad-packaging plant in Bessemer City, west of Charlotte, employing 350 people in a county hard hit by the demise of the textile industry.

The 285,000-square-foot facility is Dole's first in North Carolina. Dole received as much as $8.5 million in government incentives for the plant.

"This plant is important to Dole because it will help supply the Southeast with a nutritious, high-quality product," David H. Murdock, chairman and CEO of Dole Food, said in a news release.

But a planned frozen-fruit plant in North Carolina is apparently on hold, partly because state growers don't produce enough berries, company officials said. Two years ago, Murdock said that he wanted to build such an operation in the state.

At the salad plant opening Wednesday, Murdock challenged the state's growers to produce more berries, saying he probably won't build a fruit plant in North Carolina until production increases, said Eric Schwartz, president of the vegetable division of Dole.

"It's going to happen, but the timing is based on how soon growers can grow more berries," Schwartz said in a telephone interview. "He doesn't want to build the plant if he has to bring in berries from other states."

North Carolina growers produced 26 million pounds of blueberries and 19.5 million pounds of strawberries in 2005, ranking fourth nationally in both categories, said Brian Long, a spokesman for the state Department of Agriculture.

The salad plant will hire as many as 900 people in the next 10 years, Dole said. The facility will package salad greens brought in from around the country for distribution in grocery stores throughout the Southeast. It will ship 750,000 packages of salad greens per day.

Gaston County lost more than 4,000 textile-related jobs from 2000 to 2005.

"The jobs here at Dole matter deeply to this community," Bessemer City Mayor Allan Farris said in the news release.

The plant and related efforts, including a planned 350-acre research campus, are part of a plan to transform the former textile area. Seven North Carolina universities are recruiting scientists for the N.C. Research Campus in Kannapolis, north of Charlotte.

Murdock is fueling much of the effort. He has said he intends to make Kannapolis a center for nutritional research that will fundamentally change how fruits and vegetables are grown and consumed throughout the world.

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