Maurice A. Auerbach & Co. in Secaucus, NJ, is a major player in the whole fresh and whole-peeled garlic business across a broad section of the northwestern United States.

About a year-and-a-half ago, the company relocated from South Hackensack, NJ, to its new Secaucus facility with more than twice the space and eight times the cold storage capacity. The state-of-the-art facility has “full temperature control and cold chain throughout, including the docks and the packaging area,” said President Paul Auerbach.

Garlic is a major line for Auerbach & Co. which also handles a wide assortment of other specialty produce items.

“We handle garlic form all producing areas,” Auerbach said July 23. “We do take the Chinese as well as the domestic, meaning California, but also other non-Chinese items. We have a very large Argentine program and Mexican program.” Occasionally, the company handles garlic from other countries as well.

Auerbach & Co. does not broker the product, he emphasized. “We have product on hand, and we service all the major retailers, foodservice operators and wholesalers, whether they are independents or in terminal markets, in the Northeast.” The main focus is on customers in the New York, New Jersey and New England area, he said, but “we go as far south as Atlanta, we go as far west as Chicago, and we go as far north as Canada.”

The diversity of pack sizes the company has on hand and available for customers “makes us a very good source for a retail or a foodservice or a wholesale type of customer,” he said.

“Right now, we are in the middle of our Baja California [Mexico] deal,” Auerbach said. “We have garlic we are bringing in from Baja California, and we are selling it and we are putting it in cold storage.”

Every lot of product that arrives at the facility, garlic and otherl product, undergoes a quality-control inspection, he said. “We have one person who does noting except food safety and QC, and he checks every lot of product every day.”

Whenever a customer places an order, Auerbach said, “we have the facility, we have the product, we have the transportation, the logistics, and we know our customer base. We know what they can use and what they can’t use, and we generally maintain very good quality and rotation levels due to our personnel and facility.”

In peeled garlic, “we are one of the strongest [suppliers] in the area,” he said. “We are one of the leading importers of peeled garlic in the United States as well as one of the major handlers of the domestic product, and we do ohave a customer base for both.

The company expected to begin handling 2013 crop California garlic “in a week or two” and will California garlic at least through New Year’s, Auerbach said. Most generally, it will continue into February, but it could wrap up in January or continue into March. “We will have new-crop Argentina in before that,” often by the end of the year, he said.

Auerbach & Co. has “a very good grower-exporter base, and therefore we have good seasonality and we generally have good quality” from California to Argentina to Mexico and then back to California, he said. “We also have all sizes.”

Currently, the company had on had eight sizes of garlic from four or five different venders from three countries. In addition to the facility and the logistics, it is “on-hand inventory of quality, quantity and variety that makes us a good garlic source for anyone in the Northeast,” he said.

New on sales at Auerbach & Co. is Jane Mahoney, a recent graduate of the Food Marketing Institute at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.”She has been with us just about a month and has already proven to be a good addition to our already strong sales team,” Auerbach said.