Santa Maria, CA-based grower/shipper Babé Farms, a leader in specialty vegetables and gourmet salad blends for more than 25 years, is settling into adulthood with a new 75,000-square-foot processing and shipping facility that should keep it young at heart for years to come.

Founded in 1986 to grow, pack and ship gourmet baby veggies with plate appeal, Babé has stayed the course by currently offering a stunning array of specialty produce items, both leafy and root vegetables, that have maintained its gourmet cachet for professional and amateur chefs.

Babé Farms offers a bountiful array of specialty produce items, both leafy and root vegetables, that has given it a gourmet cachet for professional and amateur chefs for almost three decades. (Photo courtesy of Babé Farms)“We’re like a Farmer’s Market,” Babé Marketing Director Ande Manos said. “We still offer many of the original baby vegetables and spring mix that inspired our name, but our variety of specialty items, from colorful cauliflower, to organic kales, easily exceed one hundred and are more than any other grower that we’re aware of provides.”

In the subsequent years, while spring mix became a commodity in the industry, Babé maintained its market edge by offering custom salad blends that gave customers looking to develop proprietary salads a means and a mix.

Continued innovations, like its wide variety of baby head lettuces available in foodservice and retail packs, have kept Babé fresh in the minds of all chefs, who use these items as starting points for their own creations.

Other items offered by Babé Farms, “Farmer’s Market,” include seasonal baby squash, ultra-blanched blonde frisée, multiple varieties of specialty greens, a kaleidoscope of baby carrots, baby beets, kohlrabi, baby fennel, baby leeks, seasonal baby purple and green Brussels sprouts and nine varieties of specialty radishes.

With Babé Farms recent move into Fresh Venture Foods (FVF), a modern processing and shipping facility in Santa Maria that can be expanded to well over 100,000 square feet, customers can be assured that the high standard of food safety they’ve come to expect will continue as the company advances to its next stage of growth.

Babé Farms owner Judy Lundberg, who was part of the original management team from 27 years ago, designed and built FVF with Gold Coast Packing of Santa Maria. “Both of our companies were working at capacity in outdated facilities on multiple sites,” she said. “We had to do something and we decided to do it together.”

The foodservice customers that Gold Coast Packing and Babé Farms have in common are able to consolidate loading on the FVF docks. This capability reduces delivery times and shipping costs; and encourages other foodservice interests to take advantage of this one-stop shopping opportunity in the Santa Maria Valley.

Babé Farms’ strategy for success is to remain committed to its current foodservice and retail customers by maintaining consistent quality, availability and delivery times. “We want to make sure no customer falls through the cracks,” Ms. Lundberg added. “Our growth has been carefully managed so that the highest quality product and food-safety environment prevail. If we stay on that path the next twenty-five years, I won’t age as fast either.”