AUBURN - As Doug Ververs tells it, you can order a gift basket from a national company, or you can stay local by buying the basket ingredients at the New Hope Mills retail store in Auburn and shipping it yourself.

That was part of the point of a business breakfast and tour at the company's York Street factory in Auburn Wednesday.

About a dozen women of the 11-year-old Women's Business Network held their monthly meeting at the mill factory. The event included a breakfast of pancakes and sausage and a tour of the facility near North Division Street, where the company's varied products are mixed, packaged and prepared for shipping all over the country - more than 500 tons annually, said Dale Weed, New Hope Mills president.

For the women, the lesson was part of what Ververs calls "import substitution," or doing more locally, rather than

importing goods and services.

"Instead of buying a gift basket from Hickory Farms and having it shipped, you can buy something that's manufactured in the county you're based in," explained Ververs, a small business development educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Cayuga County.

Bringing the women to the New Hope Mills plant was a way to reinforce that, he said.

"Hopefully, they'll go back to their employers and co-workers to do more business locally," Ververs said.

New Hope's Auburn plant opened in 2003. It currently has about 15 employees and sales of about $2 million annually. The company stopped milling products at its Moravia location in 1996, so the ingredients for its pancake and baking mixes and flours are now imported from across the country, including New York state.

At the Auburn plant, ingredients are mixed and sealed in the company's familiar stitched bag. The plant also produces private label mixes, or mixes that are packaged under a different name than New Hope Mills. At the Auburn location, there's a retail store that sells everything from spices to bottled jams to soup mixes.

Cynthia Aikman, Auburn's planning and economic development program manager, was part of the team that brought New Hope Mills to its Auburn location.

She was there on Wednesday, sampling the company's product and taking the tour.

The visit and her involvement with the business network, Aikman said, was an opportunity to "be in a room where there are people with such creative ideas. It reinforces that in Auburn, we can do anything we want to do."

Susan Marteney, executive director of the Cayuga County Chapter of the American Red Cross, said the visit did reinforce for her the myriad of products and services available locally.

"It's nice to have something that's completely local," she said. "It's something to be proud of."