The Greek economy was ravaged by World War I. In 1922, Michael Chrysantaki, a 16-year-old boy, left his family and home in the town of Levidi in the mountainous Peloponnese region of southern Greece.  This is where the cities of Sparta and Olympia flourished in ancient times.   

Little did Michael know that his step aboard a ship in the port of Piraeus was the first step toward what would become, via a radically unlikely journey, a trendsetting produce company in Mexico called Wholesum Family Farms Inc.   

Michael’s immediate aim was to reunite with his brother Yanni Chrysantaki, who had earlier sailed to America.  

In 1915, Yanni Chrysantaki became one of 178,416 immigrants to come through New York’s Ellis Island. Greece ranked as the seventh most common homeland of those 1915 immigrants. U.S. records show this was the era’s peak year for Greek immigration to the United States via Ellis Island.

Upon landing in New York City, Yanni found an unstimulating job washing dishes, so when a Utah copper mining company was recruiting workers in New York, Yanni signed on for “the most difficult job. He set explosives, but it was better-paying. It was also higher risk,” Michael’s son, Theojary Crisantes Enciso, said as he recently recounted his family history.

Yanni worked his harrowing job for eight years before a primer went off in his hand and he lost two fingers.

Yanni’s accident brought severance pay, and he took a vacation to go to Arizona and see what was there. He wound up in Bisbee, a booming southeast Arizona copper mining town.

“It was very, very large at the time,” recounted Theojary.

As Yanni was so close to Mexico, the young free spirit wondered, “What is Mexico?”

He found himself not so far south of Bisbee, but across the border in yet another booming mining town, Cananea, Sonora. Cananea is the Apache term for “horse meat” and the home of the Cananea Consolidated Copper Co.  

“There were huge opportunities there,” Theojary told The Produce News. “Mexico had gone through a revolution. Foreigners were coming back and the area needed engineers and services. That’s when my dad and his brother joined forces.”  

Yanni had summoned Michael from Greece. Michael sailed via Havana, Cuba, to Veracruz, Mexico. The 16-year old took a stage coach and train about 700 miles across the Mexican desert to find Yanni in Cananea.

The brothers changed their name to Crisantes because it sounded more Latin. Michael became Miguel. They had a younger brother, Theojary Chrysantaki, who never came to America.

“My uncle still had savings and severance, so they leased the Plaza Hotel in Cananea, which had been run by old folks,” Theojary said.

The Plaza catered to businessmen and had a bar, restaurant and a barber shop. It boasted apartments and telephone service. The hotel also imported wines, and proved very successful for the Crisantes brothers.   

Miguel and Yanni became agricultural partners from 1925 to 1955, when they separated amicably.

In that timeframe, the men also managed Hotel Rosales in Culiacan “for a good number of years,” Theojary Crisantes said.

Miguel learned about Mexico’s summertime potato production and that there were also oranges being grown to the southwest in Hermosillo, Sonora.

He bought the first of many railcar loads of potatoes and oranges. These ran upon a rail line that ran 700 miles from Nogales to Mazatlán, Mexico.

“That was the whole route at the time,” Theojary said. On the line, “at each stop, he sold potatoes and bags of oranges. There was no Costco or food distribution center at that time” in those remote Mexican villages. But peddling at the rail stations “brought good money.”

On one of his sales trips in 1926, Miguel Crisantes wound up in Culiacan, Sinaloa, out of stock to sell. He got off the train and asked if any Greeks lived in Culiacan. There was a Greek, who lived along the river in a very nice home.

Miguel bathed, shaved and then presented himself at the home of Constantino Georgelos. The very wealthy Greek man took a liking to the bold young man.

Miguel learned that Georgelos had operated a restaurant in Long Beach, CA. In the late 1900s, the restaurateur was disappointed that California offered no wintertime fruits or vegetables. So one winter he boarded a boat for Mazatlán to buy fresh produce. Georgelos also saw a big new business opportunity.

Georgelos started growing tomatoes and peppers in Culiacan. About 1909 he began shipping to and through Nogales on the same rail line from which Miguel Crisantes would soon be selling produce.

Georgelos’ efforts were somewhat challenged by the Mexican Revolution, which would run for a decade, beginning in 1910. It was disruptive, but not as disruptive on the country’s untamed northern frontier as it was around the more sophisticated regions — and haciendas — of the central and southern parts of Mexico.

Georgelos guided Miguel Crisantes to northern Mexico production. The young farmer leased land and totally failed in his first year, 1930, in an attempt to produce chick peas, or garbanzo beans.

In Miguel’s second farming year, he also grew tomatoes, which were a commercial success. Georgelos had coached him on tomato seed selection and tomato cultivation.

Georgelos also helped on the marketing side, since he knew potential customers in Long Beach, who bought Miguel’s tomatoes, shipped through Nogales.

Theojary said, “We are very grateful to the Georgelos family. When I was president of an association here in Culiacan, we built a bridge and I had it named after Constantino Georgelos, for his being an agricultural pioneer and a fine gentleman.”

Theojary indicated that his father faced “very physical work” on his farm, which had little equipment — and then even less as World War II diverted mechanical resources to the war effort.

The work in the fields “was very personal, not like farming today. But it was good business because there were very few competitors,” he said.

Miguel Crisantes “from the get-go always wanted to be close to his customers,” Theojary said. From his days of peddling out of a rail car, “he knew that communication is very important.” From the beginning of his farming days, he established “a little office in Nogales to always have some interest in the distribution of his product. The closer we are to our customers, the easier it is to know what the trends are, or to push the trends. Sometimes you have to create them. One of the big things is that he was interested in his sons being close to the customers.”

Miguel had a daughter and three sons.  Theojary noted, “All of us were educated in the United States. I went to high school and college in the U.S.”   

Miguel’s foresight recognized that “it was important to be in tune with the large economy upon which we were very dependent. We were to learn to live how they live and know their ways. Become part of them. That is one of our most important legacies.”

Miguel Crisantes started in the tomato business by growing mature greens before moving to vine ripes. He was the first in the region to dig deep wells for irrigation, and he worked to develop new ways to fight the hated white fly.

When Miguel turned 70 years old, he turned his land holdings over to his three sons and the urban holdings to his daughter.

The message to his sons: “You have your education. Here is the land.”

Theojary Crisantes recognized that his agricultural holdings were suddenly one-third of what they had been with one owner. Thus, “I couldn’t be as competitive on cost” as had previously been the case.

After trying a few conventional vegetable crops with mixed results, Theojary realized that there could be a real niche in growing organic tomatoes and cucumbers.

“The market was very small,” he said.

He traveled to San Francisco to look for an organic market and found it enjoying a good relationship with Made in Nature.  

Crisantes a few years later sold the organic “Natura” brand produce to Albert Lusk, who founded Albert’s Organics in Los Angeles in 1982.

“He was a very nice gentleman,” Crisantes noted.

Lusk and Crisantes also had a very nice relationship until eventually arranging a friendly separation.  

Crisantes launched a high-tech greenhouse operation in Imuris, Sonora, 30 miles south of Nogales. “By then I had my sons also educated in the U.S., and they were starting to come back.”

His oldest son, Theojary Crisantes Jr., worked as a mechanical engineer for John Deere tractors, based in Moline, IL. In 1998, the son was summoned to Imuris to apply his engineering skills to the heating, cooling, air movement and boilers that were requisite to operating a modern greenhouse.

The second-oldest son, Ricardo Crisantes, was a business graduate from the University of Southern California. Theojary Sr. called his old friend Albert Lusk and asked that Ricardo receive practical experience in the distribution of organic vegetables.

Ricardo “was sent to work in Albert’s New Jersey warehouse and started at the very bottom,” he said. After nine months in New Jersey coolers, he moved to work for the company in Los Angeles.  

“Albert was pretty smart,” Theojary Sr. commented. “You need to know the business from the bottom up.”

A year-and-a-half later, Theojary Sr.’s youngest son, Adrian Crisantes, graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in horticulture that his father describes as being ideally suited for heading production in the Imuris greenhouse.

Until a decade ago, Theojary Sr. continued to lead Culiacan production. Then his sons urged that one of them should take on that responsibility. The father trained the younger Theojary for two years and then took on a corporate position.

Meanwhile, Ricardo Crisantes was running the sales and marketing from the firm’s Nogales office for Wholesum Family Farms Inc.  

Theojary Sr. noted that as organic produce demand grew, with it came a demand for “local” and U.S.-produced vegetables. Thus, the company took its growing greenhouse expertise and last year opened a state-of-the-art greenhouse several miles north of Nogales, in the desert area of Amado, AZ.

“This was set up to have a toe-hold on the U.S. market and to satisfy customer demand,” Theojary Sr. said. “We could have built a facility with three times more production in Imuris. But that wouldn’t have fit a customer demand.

 “We are very pleased” with the commercial and production success of Amado, Theojary Sr. added. The new greenhouse has brought customers that Wholesum didn’t have before. Furthermore, “we are destroying a little barrier. There is better commerce between two nations.”

Theojary Sr. said Fair Trade production, another “very important” aspect of his business, has been accomplished in the last year-and-a-half.

A dozen years ago, he saw the value of what was then a very new concept: Fair Trade-certified agricultural products. Fair Trade involves social-benefit criteria to improve farm workers’ lives. Retailers selling Fair Trade products charge an extra premium price and then give the designated extra payment to the growers, who are then responsible to turn the money over to a farm worker committee to decide on the best use of the funds.

When Theojary Sr. approached Fair Trade a dozen years ago, that program was oriented toward small-production growers. Finally, he worked with a related group that accepted the earnest interest of a large-volume grower. Wholesum’s Imuris farm is now Fair Trade-certified.

Of course, the firm’s organic operations are also organic- and food-safety certified, as well.

Whole Foods has been a strong supporter of Wholesum’s Fair Trade effort, and the national retailer sells the tomatoes under the “Whole Trade” brand.

Theojary Sr. said the Imuris farm now features 30 or 40 new homes built from Fair Trade income. There are also about 50 houses that are being expanded with these funds. A new school bus for worker’s children has been purchased and a new park is also in place. Three or four children are receiving college scholarship funds.

“This is a very, very nice program, and I congratulate Whole Foods on this program,” Theojary Sr. said, adding that the extra money gives the workers a feeling of healthy independence.

 “I want to see that the people I work with have a better life,” Theojary said.  

Theojary knows firsthand that working for a better life can eventually bring miracles.