
Generation Next: Mike Madden got hooked on a produce career
By his own admission, Michael Madden of Macadu Fresh didn’t have a career in mind when he graduated from high school in Vineland, N.J., in 2001.
He didn’t envision pursuing a professional career in medicine or the law, and in fact, didn’t think college was his thing. He had a friend who was a plumber, so he gave that path a look for several months, but it did not resonate. What he did have was a little knowledge about the produce industry from some high school summer jobs and familiarity with farming because he grew up in Vineland in South Jersey, which is arguably the center of the state’s ag economy.

Sharon and his brother, Ryan.
“I played soccer in high school with a buddy, Jonathan Molinelli, whose father was John Molinelli of John Molinelli Inc. After soccer practice, we’d go to the warehouse and pack vegetables,” Madden said. “I started when I was 15 and worked throughout high school and in the summers.”
Madden recalled that in high school this parttime job gave him quite a bit of spending money. “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew a lot of people in farming, and I knew there was money to be made.”
He had a few friends at the company and so when the opportunity arose a few months after graduating, he joined Molinelli on a fulltime basis. Over most of the first decade of this century he worked at many different jobs at the company. He was a packer, drove around to farms picking up product and worked on the loading docks. Eventually, he was able to work as a buyer visiting the local farms and purchasing their product as he had his broker’s license. He also learned a little bit about the transportation business and tried to put together an import deal with a friend who had some connections in Chile.
The import deal didn’t work out, but it gave Madden a taste of the imported fruit business. In2009, he got an opportunity to join nearby Dandrea Produce, which has fruit deals throughout the world, and he took it.
“It was a very hard decision,” he said. “I learned a lot at Molinelli and I liked working for Johnny, but it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
At Dandrea, Madden got a deep dive into the import world. “I did a lot of buying and travelled all over the world. I also got into sales. I went to Fruit Logistica (in Europe) a couple of times and down to South America a lot.”
He stayed with Dandrea for more than a dozen years before he started Macadu Fresh LLC, also in Vineland, about 18 months ago. “A lot of guys bounce around in this industry, but I was only with two companies since I started when I was 15. I’m proud of that.”

Madden is very happy to have learned the vegetable business from Molinelli and the fruit business from Dandrea. “I’m blessed to have been able to look at produce from two different perspectives,” he said.
He admitted to liking the fruit world a bit better and it is the direction that Macadu Fresh has taken. Along with two business partners — Albert Campanelli and Derek Duchon — Madden started the company simply because the opportunity came along and he was ready for a new challenge. While he runs the company and is the majority owner, his two partners played significant roles in its launch and are materially involved.
The name, Macadu, comes from the first two letters of each of their last names. Campanelli is from a flower-growing family in Ecuador and provided the initial grower connections, while Duchon hails from the transportation sector and got that end of the business off the ground.
Macadu Fresh calls itself a grower, importer and distributor of quality fresh fruits as well as some vegetables. The company has seasonal and year-round deals in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and the United States and Canada. Avocados, blueberries and citrus including navels, clementines and lemons, are its three main categories but it also brings in dragon fruit, mangos, grapes, cherries and cilantro, among other crops. The company has just started expanding and is still finding its way, but Madden said it has found a niche in the fruit business bringing air shipments into Miami and ocean shipments to ports closer to Vineland, which is where the company is headquartered.

on vacation in the mountains.
Madden is approaching his 40th birthday and admitted he “is hooked on produce. I love the action every day. You get highs and lows within 10 minutes of each other. It’s a high-risk business and that intrigues me. I never wanted a 9 to 5 job, and I don’t have one. Some days you get in at 9 and nothing gets going until noon, but you are still going strong at 8 p.m.”
Macadu has a couple of field employees on the ground in Chile and another in Peru. Madden has five people in the Vineland office and there is also an office in Miami, where the air shipments arrive. As he spoke to The Produce News in late September, he was starting to look at resumes for a couple of sales job that he posted as he believes it is time for the company to start expanding.
Madden and his wife, Justina, have a six-year-old son, Jackson, and live in Vineland, where they met as two locals. “We try to make time to do fun things,” said Madden. “We have a shore home, and we like crabbing and fishing. We also both like to play golf,” he said, relaying a recent vacation that took them to Monterey, CA, and Scottsdale, AZ, where they played some of the top course those two golfing havens have to offer, including Pebble Beach, Spyglass, Spanish Bay and the TPC Scottsdale Champions Course. “We play a lot of golf. It’s fun and good for business.”