Vijay Patel builds a hotel empire and crowns it with the Columbia Gorge Hotel.

Mac’s List, now a weekly newsletter of job postings that goes to nearly 9,000 subscribers, and a website with 36,000 visitors a month — not to mention a Facebook page and a Twitter account — recently graduated from a sideline to a business with a life of its own.

As the state’s economic malaise continues to suck the life out of industry after industry, one sector has withstood the worst of the blows. Food processing in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest as a whole has grown over the last few years, according to industry statistics. The state’s estimated $12 billion food processing industry has its giants but its true strength lies in its small businesses.

Six years after launching gDiapers, a privately held Portland company that manufactures reusable and biodegradable diaper products, co-founders Jason and Kim Graham-Nye are expanding to the United Kingdom with a new brand, gNappies.

Despite a housing market that is still depressed, one housing development in Bend — one of the hardest-hit cities in the housing-led recession — seems to be bouncing back.

The way it works now, about 16 million pounds of plastic soda and water bottles redeemed each year through Oregon’s beverage container deposit program are baled and sold as scrap, often to foreign companies. Millions more plastic bottles never get redeemed and are instead recycled curbside. They, too, usually end up as exported scrap.

When the chickens came home to roost, so did the urban farm store business.

The annual holiday shopping marathon is upon us, and in the face of a still-fragile economy, retailers around the country and locally are collectively holding their breaths.