Russo Farms launches fall lettuce program
Russo Farms launches fall lettuce program
Russo Farms has over a century of experience as a reliable grower, buyer and shipper of fresh produce. The company also manages its own fleet of trucks for delivery and maintains direct grower relationships throughout New Jersey to ensure quality and efficiency.
“This year, we started our own fall lettuce programs; we’re doing iceberg this year and have had some nice success with it,” said Thomas Russo Jr., president of the Vineland, NJ-based company. “We’re trying to bring that back into the market for New Jersey. It’s just small-scale for now for a couple of our core customers.”
Russo Farms operates on nearly 350 acres of farmland and deals in 50 categories of vegetables, with some of its best-selling items being sweet corn, peppers, squash, cucumbers, pickles and hot peppers. In the fall, key items are leaks, parsley, green onions, dill and cilantro.
“The best part of working with Jersey product is that it’s in my backyard,” Russo said. “For instance, our lettuces, we pack them in the field, they’re cooled and on the truck that night. It’s a big differentiator from California where the product is four-days old when it arrives on a good scenario. If we do everything right, the customer will get four more days shelf life.”
While Russo is optimistic that the fall will be a good one, things have not been so great in 2025 overall.
“From a growing perspective, the weather has been a huge challenge,” he said. “We got an unseasonably cold, wet spring. We had beautiful fields wiped out one after another. And then we had a very hot summer with extreme precipitation. One field, we replanted three times in three weeks. It did finally come good, but it took three times.”
Thankfully, things have cooled down in recent weeks and the early forecast for fall is very promising.
“Hopefully, we make a nice little recovery,” Russo said. “If the weather shines on us like we did last year, we finished up on Nov. 20, so we had a nice long run.”
Throughout 2025, the company has been leveraging recent equipment upgrades and advanced technology to deliver the highest quality and freshest products to its customers, staying ahead in the industry. It also trialed a drone and though feelings were mixed on it, the company does plan to try again in 2026 to see if it’s something that adds value.
“The big thing we did this year was with irrigation,” Russo said. “Irrigation is a very expensive undertaking, and we’ve put in probably $1 million in irrigation work this past year. In addition to taking a couple of the new farms we’ve brought on-line and doing drainage pits.”
Russo Farms’ customers are primarily retail-oriented and it has about 20 percent processing customers.
“We’ve been getting started with a couple of new customers, which is good,” Russo said. “The biggest growth I see, with every year that goes by, it’s more and more about quality. Everybody’s standards are getting tighter and tighter, so it’s just more of an opportunity to do the best possible job. That’s really our competitive advantage, our quality.”
Russo is also adamant about supporting U.S. growers, buying exclusively U.S. product.
“It’s challenging sometimes but I have growers I have developed relationships over the years,” he said. “I know most customers to some degree it’s not as much of a selling point, but to me personally, it’s very important that it’s a USA product.”
