Winter Fancy Food Show Booth 279
Single Origin Premium Colombian Chocolate
Made at the source
Non-GMO
Exclusively Distributed By
www.foodlinksusa.com
www.chocolatecordillera.com
Foodlinks, Inc.
Phone: 800-375-0875
10915 Eicher Drive
Lenexa, KS 66219
Sales@foodlinksusa.com
Growing the Brand and Helping
Local Producers
At Harvard, Faison studied government
and Spanish, then spent
a year on a fellowship
in the Dominican
Republic and anoth-
er year working
for Bobby Scott, a
Virginia congressman.
Following law school
at the University of
Virginia, he spent
three years in Miami
at a law firm special-
izing in cross-border
finance. Miami was
where he got into
the fine-dining scene,
gravitating to restau-
rants with a seasonal, local approach. That
interest proved to be the seed for Faison's
future business.
JAMES
FAISON
Age:
34
Years
in
specialty
food:
3
Favorite
food:
Bone-in
pork
chop.
Least
favorite
food:
Fake
meat.
Last
thing
I
ate
and
loved:
A
malted
vanilla
milkshake.
If
I
weren't
in
the
food
business
I'd
be:
A
lawyer.
One
piece
of
advice
I'd
give
to
a
new
food
business:
Be
more
passionate
about
your
business
than
your
savings
account.
smoking it for eight hours but using no
nitrates. Milton's Own Bacon Sausage is
a value-added byproduct, a way to use the
discarded bacon ends.
"Most country sausage is salted to
death and what we tried to do is make a
tasty, all-natural product with a lot less
sodium," he says, noting that each serving
has about 80 milligrams as opposed to the
more common 200. "We're appealing to a
more health-conscious consumer."
Roughly 35 pig and cattle farm-
ers have partnered with Milton's Local,
some of them with fewer than 50 animals
and some with as many as 500. They all
comply with USDA inspections. So far,
Faison isn't raising any of his own live-
stock, instead using his legal, financial,
and marketing skills to shepherd
the company.
producer profile
28 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE specialtyfood.com
