Nickey Gregory is a Georgia Bulldog, through and through. Make no mistake about it — he bleeds red and black. But he’d never let state rivalries get in the way of good business. That’s why when he saw a chance to get into the Miami market in 2011, roughly a decade after he founded the Nickey Gregory Co. on the Atlanta State Farmers Market, he jumped at it.

“We were down there working with a customer and we noticed there really wasn’t an all-around wholesaler there. Even our customer had nobody to buy from locally who wasn’t their competition,” Gregory said. “You had a lot of companies that did specialty items but nobody really did the whole thing.”

Flow-wrapped stoplight peppers make for an eye-catching presentation. (Photo courtesy of NGC)In the case of the Nickey Gregory Co., “the whole thing” includes procurement, delivery and repacking, all self-contained. The 75,000-square-foot Atlanta headquarters carries a full line of produce sourced globally and locally and features several new packing machines that allow for custom orders and packing of the company’s own “Cheryl’s Best” brand products. It’s also home to a fleet of company trucks that allows pinpoint control and overnight deliveries throughout the Southeast — not to mention burning up the road from Atlanta to Miami.

“Transportation was one of the big things we could bring to the table in establishing the Miami operation,” Gregory said. “You can drive to Miami from Atlanta without taking a break, but you can’t make six or seven stops along the way and stay within regulations. Miami took a lot of pressure off Atlanta, took a lot of the routes we’d have had a hard time covering because of the hours of operation, which lets us guarantee better service and our commitment to overnight deliveries.”

The 25,000-square-foot Miami warehouse has also been a source of new business. “Probably 50 percent of our business in Miami if pickup business, business we couldn’t have gotten out of Atlanta if we’d wanted to,” he said.

The Miami location was an instant success, though there were “a few growing pains. But we had a base of what we knew we’d sell because of what Atlanta sold down there,” Gregory said. “It helps us a tremendous amount — we bring a lot of stability to the Miami market because if anything’s short down there, everybody else has to wait two to four days to get it where we run a truck virtually every night out of Atlanta, so we always have availability.”

Miami has also proved to be a boon for the Atlanta location.

“There’s a lot of specialty stuff we do now that we didn’t even realize was down there until we opened,” Gregory said. “We do all kind of specialty items for schools all over the Southeast and you can’t find always find those items. If some schools put something exotic on the menu and we can’t find it here, you turn around and Miami knows where’s there’s boatload of it.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Miami location procured 150 cases of dragon fruit for the school system in North Carolina.

Vice President and General Manager Robert Briggs has run the Miami location since it opened and has worked in the Miami produce scene for 25 years.

“When we opened up down here the market had really grown stagnant over the years for the lack of a real true wholesaler,” Briggs said. “That’s not to diss anyone else, there are plenty of other great companies here, but it gave the market a breath of fresh air and the opportunity for people to shop elsewhere, to find something new, and the response has been great. Our dock stays full every day, we’ve made a lot of new friends, seen a lot of old faces and it’s done a lot for the whole market in general.”

Gregory spends time at both locations, and he dedicates ample resources to make sure both grow and prosper.

“Nickey’s putting his full resources behind both locations and everything that’s going on,” Briggs said. “He’s doing his part so we’re all definitely making sure we’re doing our part also. And we do have a big old Georgia Bulldog flag hanging here in the warehouse — we’re representing.”