This family is rolling in the dough.

• Position: Harvest Time Foods

In the early '80s, Anne Grimes thought pita bread would be hot stuff, but her baked specialties didn't get a rise out of customers.

Rather than Middle Eastern sandwiches, it turned out Grimes' Greenville customers hankered after chicken and dumplings, and Anne's Old-Fashioned Flat Dumplings are what they got. Last year, Harvest Time Foods, which Anne and her husband, Bryan, formed in 1981, rolled out sales of $2 million. They were named the state's top small-business owners in 1992 by the North Carolina Small Business Administration.

"I didn't think you could make a living on a simple little dough product," says Anne Grimes, 51, a Greenville native. "I was trying to do all these super-duper things, but they were bombing out."

She was running her own bakery in 1981 when she made her first batch of thin, flat noodles. She sold out almost at once.

"The next day people came back looking for more," she says. A local grocery chain, Harris Supermarkets Inc., started carrying the dumplings, too. "Word of mouth has been a good thing for us," she says.

At the time, however, success seemed a mixed blessing. Grimes says she "grumbled" about rolling out dough by hand, and her shop was plagued by flooding from the laundromat next door. Devoutly religious, the couple began to wonder in 1982 whether a higher power might not be at work. "By the will of God, we had to take some lumps on the head," says Bryan Grimes Jr., 54, a native of...