The Sweet Taste of Community Engagement

Hao Feng, Ph.D. Professor, Dept. of Family & Consumer Sciences hfeng@ncat.eduHao Feng, Ph.D. Professor, Dept. of Family & Consumer Sciences hfeng@ncat.edu

A few months from now, a person may walk into N.C. A&T farm’s $12 million Urban and Community Food Complex with their arms laden with tomatoes from their backyard garden.

“I want to learn how to turn these into home-made salsa to sell at the Farmer’s Market,” they might say.

That request – and thousands of others like it, when the building reaches full use – will spark a chain reaction across the areas of research, teaching and outreach. Working with the building’s personnel, the local grower could get a course in food product development, working up a recipe; changing it into salsa or pasta sauce; cooking a batch in the building’s commercial kitchen; tasting and smelling the result in the sensory lab, and creating a package design with an agricultural marketer. By the time growing season is over, they may have a marketable product – or more than one, complete with packaging and a business plan. Another successful small-scale agricultural business could be under way.

Meanwhile, students within the college will be learning: biological engineers will learn by working with the waste products from processing. Food and nutritional science majors evaluate nutritional content, agribusiness students to develop marketing plans, testing products and evaluate their consumer appeal.

That’s just one aspect of the Urban and Community Food Complex (UCFC’s) mission, according to Hao Feng, Blue Cross/Blue Shield Endowed Professor of Urban Food Systems and professor of food and bioprocess engineering. Feng is the building’s director: to be a business technology incubator, geared toward local entrepreneurship for multiple crops.

A big priority for the $12 million UCFC on University Farm, scheduled to open this year, will be serving the local community.

“A big piece of the complex is to serve the local community,” Feng said. “Many of the popular products we see in grocery stores started in someone’s kitchen. We can make suggestions on what they can produce and then take home, to establish their own operation. They can use our kitchen or their own at home. We can help them form small company to sell it or they could take it to the farmer’s market.

“We can transfer technology; we can patent. We want to have small companies established based on our technology.”

In the food desert that is East Greensboro, the UCFC, set to open in 2026, is poised to be a shining star, where farm-fresh foods become commodities before visitors’ very eyes.

Staffed by Feng and five other employees, the U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded building will include a creamery; a food innovation laboratory; a food quality laboratory; a food safety laboratory (Biosafety Level 2); a sensory laboratory; and a food processing pilot plant.

The space will also include a commercial kitchen and a creamery.

The space will include a commercial kitchen for food preparation.

“There needs to be a driver for promoting access to nutritious, fresh food the East Greensboro area,” he said. “As the largest college of agriculture among all HBCUs, we have a responsibility to be that driver.”

Another part of the story is based on Feng’s own Evans Allen-funded grant to study North Carolina crops, among them sweet potatoes, peanuts, muscadine grapes and ginger. In his vision, the university could have its own production lines for N.C. – based crops at the UCFC.

“Many universities have famous products produced by their farm or dairy,” Feng said. “That could be us. We could have Aggie sweet potato products, or flavors for ice cream, like muscadine.”

It’s the prospect of ice cream that excites the taste buds of alumni, students and community members alike.

Long a product of N.C. A&T’s Dairy Unit, farm-fresh milk, butter and ice cream were produced, packaged and sold in the dining hall from the university’s opening in 1891 until 1964, when the university decided to buy the products externally instead. The UCFC will bring the sweetest piece of that process back, reintroducing Aggie Ice Cream, and possibly gelato and other frozen desserts, in its small-batch creamery.

Hao Feng, Ph.D., professor of food and bioprocess engineering at N.C. A&T, right, and Elliot Hughes, creamery manager, check out the ice cream chilling area at the Urban and Community Food Complex.

“We are the only historically Black college and university in the country that has a dairy,” Feng said. “Dairy products like ice cream are consumer favorites that also allow our faculty and students to cover dairy production along its entire continuum, from animal health, nutrition, reproduction and milk production, to consumption – value-added products, quality, safety, consumer research. That allows us to integrate our food and nutritional science program with our animal science program.”

Aggie Ice Cream will not only be good to eat, it will also use the milk from the farm’s primarily Jersey herd. The “A2A2” Jersey cows produce milk that may be easier for more people to tolerate and can help introduce children and community members to dairy products.

Students can help staff the creamery, but will also bring an element of youthful “coolness” to the project, suggesting names, flavors and formulations and helping to design packaging.

“Lots of students can benefit, from the entire experience,” Fang said. “In my imagination, we’d have agricultural economics students analyzing the business side, and animal or plant science involved; food and nutritional science students can do marketing formulation; others can be a focus group, taking products to evaluate for smell, appearance, taste. On the production side, biological engineering students could develop waste plans or environmentally friendly production plans.”

“This facility will add a new dimension to the entire university and enable us to better serve our stakeholders,” Feng said. “I am thrilled that we will see this first-of-its kind facility established at A&T.”