Mr Greens began operations in Florida back in 2011 with just a handful of employees, four vehicles and a 3,000-square-foot facility located in Allapattah. Four years later, it expanded into a 69,000-square-foot facility in Liberty City and this December, the company will be expanding again, this time to a 158,000-square-foot facility in Miami.

“It’s going to be a huge change for us in a positive way,” said Nick Politis, chief executive officer of the Miami-based company. “We’ll be able to bring in more items that we currently can’t bring in because of space. Organics being one big category that we can now bring into the new facility. That’s going to be a huge addition to what we offer.”

Mr Greens will continue to service clients out of all three distribution centers and plans are already in motion for more growth.

“The Florida produce industry has definitely come a long way since we started,” Politis said. “You’re seeing a lot of higher-end restaurants, celebrity chefs and others coming from big culinary cities moving to Miami and setting up here. There wasn’t a lot of that when we first came on board here.”

That rise in restaurants has led to a rise in demand for high-quality produce, and Mr Greens has been able to supply a great deal of what was needed, and that led to the company’s own growth.

He feels organics for the retail segment will be big going forward, and by offering both conventional and organic products, it makes things easier for people to order and should lead to increases in the retail market segment for Mr Greens.

As the company entered the fall, the pandemic was still resulting in year-over-year declines, but it wasn’t as low as what it was experiencing in spring and early summer.

“We’ve come back quite a bit,” Politis said. “We’re getting closer to last year’s numbers and I’m confident that by the end of the year, we can get to where we were a year ago. We are confident with how we’ve been trending considering we are not a company that does a lot of these large chains.”

The key to seeing rising numbers as the months have gone along in 2020, is that from the onset of the pandemic, Mr Greens went to its growers and vendors and let them know they weren’t looking for extensions and continued to pay bills on time.

“If there’s a positive we found with the pandemic it is that there were some very talented people that were let go from competitors and other places that we actually hired during these last 7-8 months,” Politis said. “Whatever the new normal will look like, we are planning to increase market share and feel we are in a really good position to do that.”

The company recently leased some space in Jacksonville and will be operational there this November for the first time.

“We’ve had some customers in the northeastern part of the state servicing out of our Plant City location, but we needed to be situated in that area because there are a lot of chefs and potential customers waiting in anticipation for us to be fully operational there,” Politis said.