Happy 95th Birthday Mt. Olive Pickle Com
Fans today can enjoy a crisp Mt. Olive Pickle thanks to the forward-thinking business leaders of the North Carolina town of Mount Olive back in 1926. That’s right: America’s favorite pickle company is 95 years old. In the 1920s, several produce markets in town served a wide agricultural region. While cucumbers grew well in the area, there wasn’t much market for them. Faced with bumper crops of cucumbers rotting in the fields, the group established a pickle company, reasoning that a new market for area farmers would benefit the local economy. They named the company for their hometown.
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Organized on January 2, 1926 and formally incorporated a few weeks later in February, Mt. Olive Pickle Company started with $19,000 in capital and a 3,600 SF building. By year’s end, 37 local men and women – among them merchants, physicians, prominent farmers, railroad men, and even one 23-year-old mechanic still living at home – had invested in the fledgling firm. In the earliest days, employees used old coffee pots to pour sweet pickle brine into jars. At night after supper, the directors of the company, including the local bank president, would go down to the plant to glue on the jar labels. Less than 20 years later, in 1943, Mt. Olive implemented a profit sharing plan for employees, one of the first 200 companies in the country to do so. That plan is still in place today.
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