With quality and service being focal points for Tex Mex Sales LLC in Weslaco, TX, and a stated goal to deliver a perfect onion to retail and foodservice customers and consumers, father and son owners Marvin and Mike Davis have taken the company’s entire growing program under their wing.

While the company previously supplanted their onion supplies with contracts from other growers, the Davises now control all the acreage their product comes from.

Michael Davis and father Marvin Davis head up Tex Mex Sales, a leading provider of onions that grew its first crop almost 50 years ago. (Photo courtesy of Tex Mex Sales)“We’ve always grown a little bit ourselves but after last year and the way things went with yields — and weather was big contributing factor — we decided out of Texas to grow our own onions and that’s it, 100 percent, we don’t have any outside growers,” said Mike Davis, whose father Marvin founded the family business in 1968. “There are one or two other growers we pick on because we’ve had a successful, reliable relationship in the past, but 99 percent are grown by us and controlled by us. We do have a lot of retail business and you can’t do retail business if you don’t know what you have.”

Controlling the crop means the Davises can guarantee top quality and cover contracts for clients without relying on the whims of weather or other growers’ problems.

“We’ve become basically our own grower down here,” Marvin Davis said. “We plant when we want to plant, what we want to plant, the timing and everything. The inconsistency of other growers made us decide we wanted to have control over what we’re doing. That’s the type of business we have. The customer depends on us so we have to be able to have the right kind of product at the right time.”

This year’s crop is early and the quality appears to be top notch, thanks to perfect growing weather in Texas this year.

“We’re going to start bringing them in next week,” Marvin Davis said in late March. “This year we have a really good looking crop and last year we didn’t. Everything looks real good.”

Fully PTI-compliant and Primus Labs-certified, Tex Mex focuses on a program the Davises call Onion Care, its term for ceaseless attention to the product the company grows and ships.

“Our goal is to give you the perfect onion and that’s what Onion Care is all about,” Mike Davis said. “It’s a process from the field — not beating them up, our cup sizer helps a lot, we don’t chain grade them, we don’t beat them up — to give our consumer, our customer, a great looking onion with no mechanical damage and free of defects. The reason we do so well is we have repeat business. When we deliver to chainstores or foodservice, they like what they get and they’re reordering with us. That’s simple and that’s our premise. I don’t like problems. The buyer does not want problems either — all they want to do when they give you an order is have that delivered and not worry about it.”