Brine time: small town, company: Mt. Olive Pickle rises to the top.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: PICTURE THIS - Cover story

The town of Mount Olive has been in a pickle for 91 years.

Its eponymous pickle plant is privately owned, but out of 464 shareholders, more than half are employees or descendants of the townsfolk who rescued it in 1926. In a town of 4,500, Mount Olive is Mt. Olive Pickle Co.

The original 37 shareholders chipped in $19,000 to reinvigorate the company Lebanese immigrant Shickrey Baddour began when he saw opportunity in a bumper crop of cucumbers rotting in the nearby fields of eastern North Carolina. But Baddour's plan to sell to other pickle plants fell flat--Mt. Olive would pack and sell its own pickles, a strategy that propelled it two years ago into the best-selling brand of pickles, peppers and relishes. Mt. Olive picked up new products and outlasted competitors. Remember crunching a Cates pickle? Dean Foods Co. gobbled up the Faison-based pickle processor in 1989. Other pickle powerhouses have been absorbed, including giant Kraft Heinz Co., whose merger two years ago married Heinz pickles and relishes with Kraft's Claussen.

Mt. Olive, which declines to share financial information, finds itself as a market leader in a growing industry. Pickle sales climbed 1.3% in 2015 to $1.1 billion, part of an overall trend toward fermented foods, which are believed to offer health benefits. Yes, the ancient pickle is the subject of hundreds of websites devoted to its probiotic pluses.

Fad food or not, pickling a peck of peppers is little changed from its start, as early as 2030 B.C. when cucumbers were pickled in the Tigris Valley. The kosher dills on grocery shelves today--Mt. Olive's most popular variety --are simply sliced cucumbers handpacked in glass jars with an added brine. It's the brine that makes a bread-and-butter pickle different from the dill slice on a burger.

Mt. Olive procures about 185 million pounds of peppers and pickling cucumbers annually from 10 states and four countries: Mexico, Canada, Greece and India, the plant's native land. Many U.S. cucumbers come from the Southeast, including fields right around the corner, but Mt. Olive does not own any farmland or the delivery trucks arriving, one after another each summer, the plant's busiest season when the company's year-round workforce of about 600 swells to about 900.

On a steamy summer morning, forklifts zip between tractor-trailers full of cucumbers, headed to refrigerated trucks for holding or to huge, open-air tanks for fermenting. Each of the 1,100 vats in Mt. Olive's tank...