With year-round offices in Nogales, AZ, and McAllen, TX, and seasonal offices in California, Texas and Baja California, Bernardi & Associates Inc. stresses the unparalleled service it can offer its customers.

As a full-service broker and distributor, the firm gets in the trenches and finds the very best products for its customers. During this interview during the first few days of August, Joe Bernardi, president of the firm, could be found in his Turlock, CA, office, where he was working the mature green deal out of California. “We opened up our Baja office in April and this office on June 1 — both will remain open until the end of the year, then I’ll head back to Nogales,” he said.

By being on the ground and looking at the crop every day, Joe BernardiMr. Bernardi believes he can pick the best tomato for each customer. On this day, he was looking at mature greens for his foodservice customers. While vine ripe, Romas and the many specialty tomato SKUs have pretty much taken over the space reserved for tomatoes on supermarket display tables, the mature green is still the tomato of choice for the foodservice industry. Mr. Bernardi said its superior slicing and shipping ability make it great for virtually any foodservice chain.

While this reporter theorized that the selling of slicing tomatoes to this sector of the buy side is fairly steady and a mature market, Mr. Bernardi said that surprisingly there is still a lot of room for growth. “Everyone is trying to use fresher ingredients,” he said. “We see chains like Subway changing their menus and moving to fresher ingredients and adding sliced or chunks of tomatoes to new items. The tomato category is growing.”

But to fuel that growth he did say there should be more emphasis placed on flavor. “The breeders and seed companies have done a great job breeding for characteristics like quality and shipping ability. And that’s important to be able to slice a tomato and not have it fall apart,” he said. “But now we need them to create better flavor before we lose my kids’ generation of consumers. There are a lot of smart breeders and seed companies out there that should turn their attention toward giving us better-tasting tomatoes.”

Mr. Bernardi said the mature green deal is one of his favorite deals every year because the shippers do a great job of judging the demand in the market and then growing and marketing the crop. “They can’t afford to be wrong,” he said. “They grow those tomatoes in the heat and once they start coming they don’t stop.”

He said there is no turning off the spigot, so to speak, and slowing down or speeding up production. Once they have production they have to work on the marketing end of the equation and make sure there is a home for every tomato every day. Bernardi & Associations, of course, helps out with its cadre of customers throughout the country. Mr. Bernardi said a mixture of foodservice operators, wholesalers and repackers are the main customers for the mature greens, while the company’s retail customers take the bulk of the vine ripes and specialty tomatoes.

In early August, he was anticipating that the tomato market would strengthen across the board by the middle of the month.