Last year obviously presented its challenges, but for Somerfield Farms, it was also a time of robust sales of blueberries, and Lee Kimball noted that trend is continuing well into 2021.

“This year, in 2021, as we started the domestic season in Florida, we saw really hot markets and strong pricing through the whole Florida growing season,” said Kimball, national sales director for the Wrightsville Beach, NC-based company.  “And even with that hot pricing, the consumer activity and the consumption on the retail side actually increased.”

That, he explained, reflected the trend of Americans eating healthy foods during the pandemic, and also the excellent quality of the berries.

Somerfield Farms deals in blueberries, strawberries, blackberries and raspberries, but it is primarily a grower-shipper of blueberries, which Kimball said have been in high demand as people want healthy and delicious foods as they quarantine and eat at home more.

In talking about what it took to succeed in 2020, he made a comparison to a baseball hitter having to constantly make adjustments, adding that “agility” was the key ingredient to success during these unprecedented times.

“It was a year of learning a new normal for the short term and being able to execute within that new set of boundaries,” Kimball said. “All industries across the United States had to be agile in order to keep going. Numbers-wise, we had an excellent year, compared to 2019. We actually saw growth within our different categories of berries, but it was not an easy year.”

2021 has also been challenging, as it began with COVID-19 still in full force.

“Now things are beginning to open a little bit across the country, and we’ve seen a very volatile berry market,” he said.

“It’s probably one of the most interesting, to say it diplomatically, years in the berry industry so far in these first four months.”

It’s a year that has seen a volatile market with high peaks, low valleys and quick turnarounds.

“It’s been one where we’ve all been on our toes, we’ve all been in kind of scramble mode to keep our customers happy and continue to communicate with our retailers so that everybody knows what they’re doing,” Kimball said. “But Mother Nature and socioeconomic challenges have just made this a very interesting year.”

Kimball noted that Somerfield Farms’ packing house management technology, which it developed about 13 years ago, has played an important role in regard to food safety during COVID-19 pandemic.

“That gives us complete visibility from the clamshell in the grocery store, we can track it all the way back to the packing house, all the way back to the farm, to the particular piece of the farm that was grown into, to the soil types and every person who was involved in the picking, packing, shipping process all the way through,” he said. “I think we’re finding with the COVID-19 landscape, we’re reaping the rewards of that and providing the risk management. We have all of that in place and we’re the best in the industry at being able to provide that data in a split second.”

Somerfield Farms’ growing region in the state is the White Lake-Ivanhoe area, and it has approximately 800 conventional acres.

“The Sand Hills-Coastal Plain region down there that we’re in, has just perfectly suited soils for growing blueberries,” Kimball said. “We call it ‘blueberry country’ down in that southeastern part of North Carolina. The blueberries come big and sweet and beautiful.”

The company is also doing its part to meet the growing demand for organic blueberries, having seen that as an emerging trend this past year.

“Within North Carolina, we have added about 250 acres of organics that will be coming into production this season, this will be the first year of production here,” Kimball said.

“It’s exciting and we’ve seen tremendous growth on the organic side. The retail orders have really increased over the years.”

It’s another example of the agility Somerfield Farms demonstrates, and which has helped make it a success while also contributing to the success of its partners.