Though he is a broker specializing in berries, Louis Ivanovich of West Lake Fresh, based in Watsonville, CA, said what he is really selling is service.

The actual strawberries he is providing his customers are no different than what others can provide. He has to thrive on the services he offers.

“We are berry specialists,” he said. “Strawberries are our bread and butter. When other people have moved on to tree fruit or grapes, we’re still buying and selling berries.”

West Lake Fresh has been around for 60 years having been started by Jack New in 1954. Ivanovich joined the company in the mid-1980s and he and his partner, Sam Gabriel, bought the firm a few years later.

For many of those 50 years, brokers proliferated but today they are the exception rather than the rule. But still they have a very important role to play.

Ivanovich said being a berry specialist 12 months of the year gives him insight into what’s available on a daily basis and what are the specific needs of his customers. His goal every day is to match the available product to the various customers he has.

“We have our feet on the ground and our eyes on the product every day,” he said of the firm’s business model.

Whether the strawberries are being produced in Florida, Mexico or one of the many California districts, Ivanovich has someone looking at the daily production and matching it to the specifications that his customers want.

He explained that the original owner operated as a more diverse broker handling various crops including an apple deal from the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville. But over the years, many of those other crops saw the land being devoted to strawberries as the climate was great and berries can be much more lucrative on a per acre basis. As such, West Lake Fresh began specializing in that crop. Ivanovich said in those early days strawberries were not a year-round producer, which led several growers to plant rotational crops “and they asked us to sell them.”

Consequently to this day, besides being a year-round strawberry broker, West Lake Fresh also represents a local Italian squash deal from June through October and an English pea/green bean/fava bean deal from April to November.

But he repeated that strawberries are his specialty. In the big picture, Ivanovich said securing labor is the number one issue facing strawberry growers.

It is a very labor intensive crop and it is no secret that there is a labor shortage in the agricultural sector. There has been no immigration reform allowing workers into the country, while at the same time anti-immigrant rhetoric and increased enforcement activity at the border has slowed the migration of workers to the United States. But this longtime strawberry production observer said the labor shortage issue stretches well beyond the border.

“They are facing the same labor shortage challenges in Mexico,” he said, noting that the farmworker population is aging and it is not a career that young people embrace.

As far as trends go, the West Lake executive has noted much more interest in organic strawberries. He said growers who have increased their organic acreage have found a lot of success as the f.o.b. market continues to be in a demand exceeds supply situation for organic berries.