Despite being a small-batch nut butter business, the following for Big Spoon Roasters continues to get bigger and bigger. With the production room shut down for the day behind him, the company’s co-owner and president Mark Overbay walks through dozens of the shipments set to go out to grocery stores or Amazon customers.
“We have six different bars, we have about 20 different nut butter recipes that we make right now,” he says. “A lot of people say ‘flavors’ to represent different types of products — we don’t use that word, we call our different products ‘recipes’ because we only use real, whole ingredients.”
The shipping area, however, is not what you’d expect. Configured from initially being a flex office space, it’s one of several units at 4517 Hillsborough Road in Durham that Big Spoon Roasters has taken over since setting up shop in 2013. Overbay says the company has expanded its space in the building three times to reach just more than 6,000 square feet, but that the layout is not very conducive to their work.
“It’s like playing Pac-Man,” he says. “You’re going around walls through doors and around another wall until you get to where you need to go here. In our new space, it’ll all be laid out very linearly and cleanly, just from an efficiency perspective and an ergonomic perspective for our team. Just being able to go in smooth lines will be better for everybody.”
Production lines, full-time employees and an award-winning business is a far cry from how Overbay began his nut butter journey. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Zimbabwe near the turn of the century, Overbay missed eating peanut butter and decided to make his own from fresh ingredients. The habit came back with him to the U.S. and soon he began to wonder if he could make the butters for a living. He and his wife, Megan Overbay, co-founded Big Spoon Roasters in 2011 and began taking their creations public.
“We started selling our products at the Carrboro Farmers Market in the spring of 2011,” says Overbay. “Our very first public event before we even got into the farmers market, before we even had a logo, was a cycle cross race at the Orange County Speedway.”
Since 2018, however, the company has been looking for a building to call its own. The opportunity arose when a company moved out of a big warehouse off 500 Meadowlands Drive in Hillsborough — just six miles away from Big Spoon Roasters’ current operations.
The new space allowed the Overbays to start with a blank slate inside the building. There are necessary parts for a growing food business Big Spoon Roasters will have for the first time: an expanded production space, dedicated Research and Development lab space, operations offices and a dock-height loading bay.
But Overbay says there will be several key improvements for the employees working the production lines. A locker space with private changing stalls, a dedicated sanitization area and a wellness room for relaxation will all be upgrades. Overbay says they are even cutting space for windows near the production floor so workers can look outside and be mindful of the environment, which he describes is a core mission to aid employees and consumers.
While production on Big Spoon Roasters products has increased in recent years, the small-batch nut butter business looks forward to the expanded space in their new location. (Photo via Big Spoon Roasters.)
“If you feel removed from nature, if you feel removed from the planet, the ecosystem you’re a part of, I think you lose touch with everything,” says Overbay. “[You lose touch] with wildlife, how your food is grown, how your food is made, what trees grow around you, what the weather is like. So many manufacturing environments I’ve been in have no windows, no natural light. But I think having that connection to outside, that’s the kind of culture we want to have in the building.”
With construction costs rising over the course of remodeling the new space, the Overbays turned to a crowdfunding campaign in June to help cover some of the costs. Dozens of supporters have raised around $19,000 and while that is short of the listed goal, Overbay says he feels like the fundraiser was already a success. He says every customer relationship and every interaction with a fan of their nut butters makes a difference.
“Those are all incredible shots in the arm that we get on a daily basis. I don’t take any of that for granted, none of us do. If somebody takes time to give you positive feedback, that’s something to really cherish. So, just by nature of us being able to grow because more people are buying our products, that is what keeps us motivated and that’s what tells us our values are resonating with people.”
The Big Spoon Roasters crowdfunding campaign ends on August 1, with the anticipated move to their new facility in Hillsborough planned for mid-August.
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