D’Arrigo New York has a long history with the New York Produce Show & Conference, and is ecstatic that the annual trade show in its “backyard” is offering a live and in-person experience this month.

“We’re just really excited for the whole thing to happen this year because it feels like it’s been forever,” said Gabriela D’Arrigo, vice president of marketing for the company. “We’ve attended a couple of shows this year, but this is the only one that we have a booth at.”

At the New York Produce show, the company will operate four booths, with team members from both New York and California sharing space.

“We partner up and take a larger floorplan at the show, which is nice,” said D’Arrigo, who works in the New York office. “They represent the Andy Boy label, and we represent the brands and growers out here who we represent.”

The booths will be flush with some new material and the company has changed the design of the booths this year, modernizing it for 2021.

D’Arrigo New York donates the left-over product to City Harvest at the end of every show.

“We are going to have a decent showing, but not as many people as we usually do,” D’Arrigo said. “We’ll be shifting out employees coming to the booth, setting up times, but not having a ton of people so we can keep the congestion down.”

For those coming to New York for the show, D’Arrigo New York is offering the opportunity to tour its facility and show off all of the new things it’s been doing. Still, the show can be somewhat bittersweet.

“As wholesalers, you’re the quintessential middle-men,” D’Arrigo said. “When your suppliers are meeting your customers, there’s always that thing in the back of your mind of ‘will they go direct?’ It’s something that over the course of the last several decades in our industry has happened quite often. But they often find out it’s not really as convenient as they thought it was.”

She describes New York as being a “very unique city,” as many of the customers are small, independents that don’t have the warehouse or storage ability.

“But we’re excited to have all our suppliers here and see the changes that we’ve made,” D’Arrigo said. “We have a new facility that we’re excited about. We’ve made some big renovations to some of our other facilities. We want to be as humble as we can, but at the same time, you want people to know what you’re doing to make your company more efficient.”

The strategy talk for the show traditionally starts right after Fresh Summit concludes. But when the company learned Fresh Summit would be cancelled this year, those planning sessions started a little bit earlier.

“Mostly in terms of how we would position the booth, what types of branding materials we were going to have, and then I work with the rest of the executive team and we start to coordinate how we’re going to break down shifts and who are the people we want to prioritize, how are we going to organize tours at the facility,” D’Arrigo said. “It seems like there are a million dinners planned, so we discuss how we’re going to split up our team so we’re covering all our bases.”

All of that is penciled in, and as the event gets closer, D’Arrigo New York narrows things done and sets the plan in motion.

“Being able to host as many people as you can is of the upmost importance,” D’Arrigo said. “It’s rare that you have all of your vendors and customers coming to you in one place, so trying to make the most of that takes quite a bit of planning.”

With everyone in the industry in the same boat when it comes to labor and trucking challenges, D’Arrigo feels those will be the main topics of conversations on the show floor.

“Every aspect of every segment of the industry has the exact same issues, just in a different way,” she said. “That’s rare.”

With 2021 winding down, D’Arrigo New York admits it went into the year being optimistic but cautious.

“We didn’t bite off more things that we could chew. We put somethings on hold that we wanted to get done, and prioritized quite a bit,” D’Arrigo said. “We put funds where the things we needed to happen first, happened first. Going into 2022, I think our confidence is up a little bit more based on how things seem to be going. Buying habits from consumers and customers are improving.”

In 2022, the company is looking forward to growing out its organic division, having brought on Eric Mitchnick to lead the department.

“I’m really excited to see where that goes, because I believe the organic category is just constantly picking up steam and I’m looking forward to seeing that develop more in the future,” D’Arrigo said.