Paul Boris of Deerfield Beach, FL-based AgriTrade Farms LLC began his career at age 13 working with his father on the Pompano State Farmers Market in Pompano Beach, FL. That partnership continued until 1995. Now things have come full circle as his son Brent Boris works alongside him.

“My father was a tough teacher and one of the legendary characters at the Pompano market,” Paul Boris said. “My son has joined me in the business, so I guess you could say I’ve come full circle. I guess you could say it’s in the DNA.”  

Paul Boris’s father was one of the “Big Five” on the Pompano market, a group of shippers who “did 80 percent of the business out of Florida,” he said. “Back then the Pompano market was the country’s largest winter vegetable market and dad’s Mo-Bo Produce Co. was pretty well-known.”

When Paul Boris was in eighth grade, he took a typing course. His dad found out about his new skills and put him to work at Mo-Bo “and that was pretty much the beginning of my produce career, he had me coming down to the office after school to fill out bills for railcars and trucks,” Boris said.

Soon he was loading trucks on the dock and eventually became a partner in the company.

After Mo-Bo, Paul Boris spent the next decade and a half working with other grower-shippers, making connections in the Dominican Republic and other Southern climes. Those connections are now paying off for AgriTrade Farms.

The company has made a mark with okra, but also directly imports greenhouse vegetables like colored bell peppers, mini-cucumbers, cluster tomatoes and “considerable supplies” of chilis including habanero, Jalapeno, long-hot, finger-hot and Thai. A new focus on Asian items has added exotics like long squash, fuzzy squash and Indian and Chinese bitter melons to the mix.

“Due to North America’s exploding ethnic demographics, items that were once niches are becoming mainstream,” Boris said. “Our goal is to stay ahead of this curve.”

“In addition to the product we directly import, we act as buying brokers. We ship tropicals, greenhouse vegetables and Southern vegetables, such as beans, peppers, cucumbers, squash, eggplant, tomatoes, from all over — it’s a trading company,” Boris said. AgriTrade partners with growers to produce many of its products and sources others from long-time connections.

“We grow the okra in Honduras and we have alliances with greenhouse and traditional growers there and in the Dominican Republic,” Boris said. “Everything is Primus-certified — we’re one of the only GlobalGAP-certified okra farms in Central America and our okra business looks like it’s going to double this season from last season. We put an emphasis on putting up a premium pack and stringent pre-harvest and post-harvest practices and the trade has recognized that. We started importing the beginning of November.”

AgriTrade ships standard packs and is also now positioned to do value-added packs. The company has been working on extended shelf life packaging for okra and other products that will be ready in December.