California-based Talley Farms is expanding its presence in the U.S. with a new office in the Midwest, and has tentatively entered into bell pepper supply partnerships with growers from across North America.

Anthony Totta

As part of the fresh push with a new office in the Kansas City area, the company has appointed Anthony Totta as its director of marketing and business development.

“In the United States we actually don’t produce nearly enough to meet demand, and Canada and Mexico make up the majority of that gap,” Totta tells www.freshfruitportal.com.

“There’s opportunity to take advantage of the demand for quality and a variety of peppers both in the foodservice and retail sectors.”

Prior to the new role, Totta was working with the central Californian company in a consulting capacity.

“We’ve got a lot of good customers but a lot of customers would like to have that quality year-round,” he says.

In response, Totta and company owner Ryan Talley traveled the country in search of partners, securing likely agreements in the pipeline from Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, New York, northern California and Ontario, Canada.

“It’s in process. We have physically met with and have verbally agreed to work together…it will be continually evolving,” he said, adding the signing and final details of the agreements have not yet been finalized.

“Probably the area we have not quite developed as much yet is Mexico, but we’ve had a few meetings with the Mexican supply sources.”

But how can the company ensure the same quality standards, which in Totta’s words have developed a strong and loyal following for Talley’s bell peppers?

“We’re using our own standard as the standard,” he says.

“We start with the seed variety that makes sense on our farms and climate, and that’s been perfected in an ongoing way.”

But not all climates are the same obviously, so for Talley Farms it is a learning process with the common end goal of keeping the end product up to spec.

“When we visited the Southeast for instance of the U.S., the type of growing and type of varieties, there’s quite a bit of difference in the type of things they have to deal with versus what we have to deal with on the West Coast, and vice versa,” Totta says.

“We have really high land costs and tight water supply, and they have tons of water and lower priced land, but they also have a lot more soil-based diseases that attack plants. They have to grow with plastic for instance and we don’t on the West Coast.

“The goal in all the best in class producers in each one of the areas is the final product we send out in the boxes and the bins, and that’s what we were after, to find those who have the standard of excellence and collaborate.”

He says the big focus is how to get family farms to deliver to the industry “what it wants, year-round”.

“That’s what we have done and that’s what we will consolidate to do more effectively.”

And the marketing aspects of the office expansion follow the golden rule of real estate – location, location, location.

“By locating in the central U.S. with an office where the trade is, some of the major buyers are within 30 minutes and some within three hours of where we’re located, we can service them, supply them, work with them in merchandising and doing sustainable business,” Totta says.

Talley Farms currently has 400 acres of farmland on the West Coast, and has historically been a field green bell peppers grower.

“The tweaking that’s done is for that purpose, to have the thick-walled, square-shouldered, four-lobed, dark complexion green peppers.

“What happens with Talley Farms is we start in early to mid August and run into November.

“Over the years because of the reputation and the good arrivals and the good shelf life and the good experience the trade has had, they know to come to us as soon as we start.”

He adds the bell pepper category also benefits retailers due to its crossover benefits for salads and other food items.

“If you sell more peppers you sell more salad, you sell more onions, and peppers are used in so many dishes.

“There is a lot of impact store-wide, and then the addition with all the colored bells, I can’t think of many things in our produce industry that are as fun to photograph, eat and are healthy, all at the same time.”

www.freshfruitportal.com