News

We will reopen, Apple Wedge owner declares

Apple Wedge owner Greg Nix speaks to fellow farmers at the Winter Apple School on Feb. 5 at BRCC.

By Bill Moss, Published: February 12, 2025

Greg Nix got a call on Saturday night after the fire that destroyed his packing house, a key player in Henderson County’s $30 million-a-year apple industry. It was from Rick Moss, a lifelong friend who owns the packing house next door to Nix’s Apple Wedge Packers.

“And he said, ‘What’s the plan?’ And I said, ‘Sometime tomorrow afternoon after church I gotta go buy a pencil and a piece of paper,’” Nix said.

The need for something as basic as a writing utensil pretty much summed up the result of the fire.

“Literally, everything that we own and that we work with is burned up,” Nix told his fellow growers at last week’s Winter Apple School and meeting of the Blue Ridge Apple Growers at Blue Ridge Community College.

“In my opinion we have a 100 percent loss,” he said. “All the buildings there, all packing equipment in the field. We have yet to be able to get into the packing side of house — it's not safe. We do not know what was lost there, but I would think we've lost all of it. We’ve lost the forklifts. We've lost all of our bins plus the growers’ bins.”

A fire that spread from a pile of burning cardboard outdoors caught apple bins on fire on the ground then spread into the cooled storage space, packing and cider-making room. Fire marshal Kevin Waldrup has declared the blaze an accidental fire, Nix said.

“We have been through it with the fire inspector from the insurance company and we have met for the first time with the insurance adjuster,” Nix said last Wednesday morning. “I’m meeting with a builder this afternoon. I've already met with demo people, so we're ready to get things done and the insurance company is working with us.”

As soon as they arrived at the Bearwallow Road business, Edneyville firefighters issued an “all call” for mutual aid, activating all 12 volunteer fire departments in the county, plus Hendersonville plus departments in Buncombe, Transylvania and Polk counties — 22 departments and around 150 firefighters in all. Even so, there was little they could do to save the structure and contents from the conflagration. They were able to prevent the fire from reaching Moss’s packing house next door.

The loss of Apple Wedge is “a major setback not only for the Nix family but the entire county,” Terry Kelley, director of the county Agriculture Extension Service, told the Lightning three days after the Jan. 31 fire. He estimated that 20 to 25 of the county's 80 to 100 growers, “maybe even a little more,” used Apple Wedge to pack and market their crop. 

With contracts in the works to remove the burnt-out shell and start over, Nix assured the growers that he would rebuild.

“Our plan is to move forward to get Apple Wedge back to packing,” he said. “To say that we will have Apple Wedge back to packing for this coming season, I don’t think that is at all possible. To say that we will have Apple Wedge back in some capacity is very possible.”