The Nickey Gregory Co. was founded on the Atlanta State Farmers Market 15 years ago and has since become one of the Southeast’s premier distributors. A second location in Miami opened in 2011 has been a major contributor to that success, giving the company easy access to and control over a steady supply of staples and specialty items that makes sure the Atlanta HQ never comes up short.

Gregory hit on the idea for a Miami location when “we were down there working with a customer and 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.”

In the case of the Nickey Gregory Co., “the whole thing” includes procurement, delivery and repacking, all self-contained. The Atlanta HQ 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 Miami warehouse has also been a source of new business. “Probably 50 percent of our business in Miami is pickup business, business we couldn’t have gotten out of Atlanta if we’d wanted to,” Gregory 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 kinds of specialty items for schools all over the Southeast and you can’t 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 a boatload of it.”