A tribute to Thomas Phillip Nunes Sr., a Salinas Valley giant

One of the last of his generation of Salinas Valley Iceberg lettuce giants, Tom Nunes (T3) died on Aug. 5 at the age of 95 after a stellar career of twice building prosperous and innovative vegetable grower-packer-shipper organizations, and spending his entire life in the industry.

Salinas, CA, and the valley surrounding it have long been known as the “Salad Bowl of America,” with lettuce and other vegetables first gaining prominence about a century ago. But it was the generation of agriculturalists born in the 1920s and 1930s who built the area’s farming operations post-World War II that ushered in a new era with innovation throughout the later half of the 20th century.

The career of Tom Nunes exactly mirrors that time frame as he started farming with his father in 1950 at T. Nunes & Son after graduating from Stanford University with a degree in economics. But it wasn’t his first career choice. In fact, he wanted to become an architect.

Born on Nov. 2, 1928, and raised in Chualar, south of Salinas, young Tom Nunes was an excellent athlete at Salinas High School. He was a top sprinter as a teenager, winning the Northern California High School Championship in 1946 at the age of 17. In fact, he competed in the finals in the California High School State Championship that year in the 100-yard dash coming in fifth place. He was also an excellent football player as both a running back and a defensive back. He was good enough to be recruited by some of the top colleges in the nation, including Notre Dame. Nunes picked nearby St. Mary’s College, which was a football power in those days, to begin his college career. He did play football that first year on a team that was ranked seventh in the nation and good enough to play in a college bowl game. He turned his attention to academics the following year as he transferred to Stanford University in Palo Alto.

“My dad wanted to be an architect,” said son Tom Nunes Jr., known as T4, which pays tribute to the long straight line of men in the family tree who have shared the same name. “He loved to plan and execute. And he did that in his career as he built a company and was the architect.”

Grandson T5, the current president of The Nunes Co., noted that T3 also used his architectural skills in running the production side of his various companies for close to 50 years. He would meticulously plan out the harvest schedule, he said, to make sure their grower deals and company farms would keep the coolers full and their customers with a continuous flow of product. For many years those detailed plans were created without the use of a computer, in much the same way that an architect would create a blueprint for a building.

It was pragmatism that caused Nunes to start down the agricultural path. Of course, he had been driving a tractor on his father’s farm since he was a kid and knew that business well. But it was the combination of his graduation from college, the advent of a marriage and the arrival of T4 that caused him to pursue farming as a career.

T. Nunes & Son farmed about 400 acres of vegetbles for several different Salinas Valley-based shippers, which is where Nunes started farming with his dad. In 1955, along with four other growers, Nunes invested $5,000 and grew 400 acres of Iceberg lettuce for the group’s new company, Growers Exchange. Nunes served as president for 10 years as the company expanded and added growing districts in the California desert, Arizona and Colorado.

It was at Growers Exchange that Tom and Bob Nunes began their life-long partnership. In the late 1950s Bob bought into the partnership and took over the sales department.

T4 noted that his father and uncle maintained their business relationship with a clear division of duties from that day forward. “My dad was Mr. Outside, taking care of the farming, while Bob was Mr. Inside, taking care of sales,” he said.

In 1966, the duo left Growers Exchange to form Nunes Bros. of California, a vertically integrated grower-shipper operation of fresh vegetables. The Nunes brothers quickly set themselves apart. Tom Jr. noted that his father was the first grower to use sprinkler irrigation to foster seed germination. They also innovated on the marketing end pioneering film-wrapped lettuce and using the wrapper as a way to communicate with shoppers. Their earliest promotion was a joint venture with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt, offering 25 cents off the Lawry’s product with the purchase of a head of wrapped lettuce.

Soon thereafter, the two partners developed a documentary of the company that led to its sale. The film was shown at an industry convention in San Francisco in 1968. After seeing the film, the president of the parent company of Chiquita bananas, United Brands, began negotiations with the Nunes brothers and eventually bought the company, along with several others, to form Interharvest.

In 1970, Interharvest famously signed the first labor contract in the Salinas Valley with the United Farm Workers. That led to upheaval in the industry with Tom and Bob Nunes resigning from the company, triggering a five-year, non-compete agreement.