Great West Produce Inc., a long-established distributor specializing in leafy greens and other vegetables in Commerce, CA, has diversified in recent years into other commodities.

Last fall, the company added a pineapple program and a melon program, and also hired Todd Smith to head up sales on the new melon and pineapple programs, according to Sean Villa, president of Great West Produce.

Smith is a 30-year produce veteran who was previously commodity manager for melons at Valley Fruit and Produce in Los Angeles.

Todd Smith with a Lemon Drop melon.“I started out at G&G Produce about 30 years ago,” Smith told The Produce News, recapping his produce career. From working in the warehouse and doing customer service, “I kind of moved my way up.”

From G&G, “I went over to Sysco Foodservice,” he said. He worked in the foodservice sector for 20 years or so, either with broad line or specialty houses, and then moved into retail, becoming a buyer for Top Value Markets. He has been with Great West since November 2013.

Smith said he had done business with Great West in the past and has known owner Paul Villa for about eight years. “I always admired the way that Great West does business. It falls into line with the way I like to do business. I like the high standards, the ethics, and just the attitude that they have toward the business.” So when the opportunity came to join the company, “I took it,” he said.

Although Smith’s primary responsibilities at Great West are buying and selling melons and pineapple, “I am not a lone wolf doing my own thing,” he commented. “We are integrating as many of our commodity lines [with] our common customers as we can. It is a broad-based growth trajectory that we are working on here at Great West.”

Smith’s previous experience with pineapple was on the retail side, so working with pineapple from a wholesaling or brokering perspective is new to him. It “takes on a different dimension when you are doing it from a new perspective,” he said.

“For the most part, pineapple is a fairly stable commodity,” and business is largely driven by quality and relationships, he said. “I am trying to establish both.”

The company is handling primarily Costa Rican pineapples packed under several different grower labels. “I’ve dealt with various importers here in town,” Smith said.

In the melon program, Great West is handling primarily melons from Martori Farms, headquartered in Scottsdale, AZ. Smith first began building a relationship with Martori Farms when he was at Valley Produce. When he was first named commodity manager for melons at Valley, he said, “I was taking over for a person who had been working for the company for 25 years, who was well-known in the industry. I had big shoes to fill.”

Smith pondered what he might do differently to make an impact and decided to reach out to Martori Farms, which “had left the [L.A.] market about 20 years prior.”

He offered to carry the Martori product at Valley. “They were agreeable but a little skeptical,” he noted. “They didn’t have a strong desire to re-enter the L.A. produce market with their label.” But the program was successful. “I did a substantial amount of business with them last year,” he added. When Smith moved over to Great West, he brought the Martori melon deal with him.

During the winter, he handles offshore melons under various labels, “but for the summer deal, primarily I am focusing on Martori and their ‘Candy’ label,” he said. The program consists mainly of cantaloupes but also includes Honeydews, Golden Honeydews, Hami melons, watermelons, mini watermelons and a new proprietary specialty melon called Lemon Drop. The Lemon Drops, he said, look “similar to a Galia with a net on it.” They are yellowish-gold in color with a light green flesh that “has almost a citrus flavor to it.”

Martori has only been promoting the Lemon Drops the last couple of years and had not done so in Los Angeles, Smith said. Now, “we’ve gotten approval from several of our major retailers here to carry it” and one major retailer has gone on ad with it. “We are really having some success on the retail side with that Lemon Drop.”

Martori grows “a very nice Hami melon,” but it is a small program that “I am hoping to expand,” he said.

“Of course, their big deal is cantaloupes,” he continued. “They are heavy suppliers” to some major retailers, “so they supply the large fruit that those customers demand. They supply the Caribbean seed variety that those customers demand, and that is what I get, so it gives me an edge” over many of the growers “in the desert and on the West Side.”

The season runs from late April or early May to the end of October or early November, going from the end of the offshore deal to “about two or three weeks before the beginning of the new offshore season, so they almost fill the whole gap,” he said.