MIAMI — It is fewer than 200 miles from Miami to Nassau, Bahamas. A truck like one of the many from the Nickey Gregory Co. fleet could make the trip in half a day. But the Atlantic Ocean makes reaching the Caribbean islands more of a logistics challenge.

Which means there is tremendous opportunity there for full-line distributors like the Atlanta-based Nickey Gregory Co., which has a second location in Miami.Nickey and Cheryl Gregory at their south Florida condo. The Nickey Gregory Co. is headquartered in Atlanta with a second location on the Miami Farmers Market. Photo courtesy of NGC

“It’s going to become a very big part of our business,” said Robert Briggs, general manager and vice president of the Miami operation. “There are a few people that we are actually calling on that, even though they’re down in the islands, their product ships from Jacksonville. So now we’re able to get the Atlanta division involved a little — they’re much closer to Jacksonville than we are. So it’s gone from just being a south Florida/Miami division thing to hollering out to Atlanta, ‘Hey we could use your help here’ and they’re stepping up to the plate.”

So far deliveries have gone to St. Thomas, the Bahamas and Suriname (south of the islands 0n the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America).

The Nickey Gregory Co. is just now “dipping our toes into the export side of the business, so far it’s worked out pretty well,” said Briggs. “We’re able to pick and choose who we want to call on and with the handful of people we’ve sent product to so far it has worked out very well. You have to be careful who you do business with, but we’ve been very fortunate up to now to choose who we want to call on as the business grows.”

The Nickey Gregory Co. opened its second location in Miami in October 2010 and business has boomed ever since. President Nickey 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, as well as the company’s own Cheryl’s Best label products. There is also a fleet of state-of-the-art company trucks that allows pinpoint control and overnight deliveries throughout the Southeast — not to mention burning up the road from Atlanta to Miami.

With the Caribbean program, that reach is going to continue to lengthen.

“The Bahamas, Suriname and St. Thomas, that’s just where we’ve stretched out so far,” Briggs said.