Turek Farms ready to network at NY Produce Show

Visitors to booth No. 402 at the New York Produce Show and Conference had the opportunity to meet with the team from Turek Farms, as representatives from the company catch up with some of its current customers and introduce themselves to potential new clients. It’s an important event for the company for many reasons, including the fact that it takes place in the biggest city on the East Coast.

“New York is so different from where we come from,” said Jason Turek, a partner at Turek Farms, and its marketing company, Cayuga Produce, headquartered in King Ferry, NY. “Even being upstate, a few hours away, it’s just vastly different from what we’ve got going on here. It’s a perfect opportunity for us to catch up with a ton of our customers who are in that Philly-Baltimore-Boston-New York area.”

A number of representatives from the company will be meeting with customers and thanking them for their business over the past season at the show.

“There are some people who I don’t really get a chance to hang out with, just once a year at this show, so I’m looking forward to catching up with them,” Turek said. 

In addition to catching up, Turek expects to talk about some of the challenges facing the industry with his fellow produce professionals.

“For us, it’s inflation — transportation is way up,” he said. “Fertilizing and packaging are over double what they were two years ago and there’s no sign of any relief in sight. We need to take a cautious approach to what we stick in the ground over the next year and try to figure out what people are really going to be buying.”

This year presented New York with a big challenge in terms of weather, as the region dealt with a drought — a big change from last year when there was too much rain.

“We were burning up here for several weeks,” Turek said. “The front third of our season was a struggle — our volume was way down, but there’s no doubt the economy is a little sluggish, and had we had a full crop, I’m not sure we would have sold it all.”

He noted that opportunities have come as a result of crop stress in other parts of the country and in Canada. The West Coast has had challenges growing lettuce and Canada’s weather has affected kabocha squash.

“There’s some strong markets on stuff, but it’s only because somebody else has really suffered somewhere,” he said.

Turek also has concerns about the possibility of a recession, and whether or not that will drive people away from fresh produce to the frozen aisle, but regardless of the circumstances, the team at Turek Farms - Cayuga Produce will continue to work hard and collaborate with their customers.

“We just really enjoy growing crops and we put a lot of pride into it,” he said. “We like taking care of the people who take care of us, so we’ll look at what the patterns were this year and base our planning and our intentions on what happened this year.”