Passion. Respect. Integrity. Determination. Excellence. Each can be a factor for a business to be successful. But when a business is built on a foundation of all five, great things are bound to happen.

Joe Procacci knows this all too well, which is why the stated core values of Procacci Bros. Sales Corp. use the acronym PRIDE to represent each tenet.

Procacci Bros. owners Joe and Michael Procacci at their headquarters on South Lawrence Street in Philadelphia in 1967. (Photo courtesy of Procacci Bros. Sales Corp.)It’s a philosophy that has propelled the Philadelphia-based company into a position of leadership in the produce industry and garnered much recognition and a handful of high-profile awards to the company chairman and chief executive officer.

The story of Procacci Bros. is one of humble beginnings. Joe Procacci was one of five boys born to Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1912. Each of the sons began working in produce at a very young age, peddling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart around the Camden, NJ, neighborhood where they were raised.

At age 18, Procacci and his brother, Michael, purchased a wholesale produce company in Allentown, PA, and began repacking tomatoes. They built the business there for two years, but decided to return to the Philadelphia area in 1948.

Upon returning, the brothers set up shop in their father’s 16x16-foot cellar, ripening and repacking tomatoes for area stores and sandwich shops.

Joe Procacci at his Philadelphia office in December 2013, showing off his first tomato packaging used when he and his brother were repacking tomatoes in his father’s basement in the late 1940s. (Photo by John Groh)“When we started in my father’s cellar, we bought green tomatoes and ripened them and repacked them into consumer containers,” Procacci said. “We ripened them naturally without any ethylene gas and packed them into our own ‘Garden State’ label. In the beginning, we each had a route that we would go to retail stores and sandwich shops, and three days a week we made deliveries in an old car we had. We were doing a very small volume in the beginning, maybe 600 masters a week, with 10 units per master.”

Business was catching on, and they outgrew those tight quarters fairly quickly. The brothers moved to a new location near the old Dock Street Market in Philadelphia, paying $35 per month in rent.

“We only lasted there a couple of months before we outgrew that space,” Procacci said. “We then rented an entire floor in a loft building behind the market, and we soon outgrew that one too, so we rented another floor and then eventually the entire building, which was four floors. We continued to grow, and soon we rented the building next door and punched a hole in between and were operating from the two buildings.”

But Procacci realized that operating a repacking business on multiple floors in separate buildings was not a model of efficiency, so in1955 the company purchased its first building at Fifth and Oregon in Philadelphia, converting the 9,000-square-foot structure into a packinghouse and adding ripening rooms for its tomatoes. This proved to be a more suitable dwelling for the burgeoning company, and it remained there for close to eight years. But further growth was just around the corner.

In 1959, the old Dock Street Market was supplanted by the new Food Distribution Center, and in 1964 Procacci Bros. built its first building there to accommodate anticipated growth. But again, a booming business soon maxed out the capacity at the new 50,000-square-foot building, and it was expanded to 100,000 square feet four years later.

“We just kept growing, and not long after that we acquired more buildings, and now we have seven buildings on 34 acres in the South Philly area,” said Procacci.

The success of the business was not without pitfalls. For example, Procacci said that not long after expanding the building on the Food Distribution Center to 100,000 square feet, a fire occurred, causing millions of dollars in damage.

“We were lucky,” he said, “because we had a lot of people who believed in us and who supported us. The first person to arrive the morning after the fire was my banker, who told me that whatever financing we needed would be available for us. We were able to recover from that setback pretty quickly.”

In the early years, Procacci worked tirelessly to build the business and the company’s stature in the industry. He worked as the buyer for Procacci Bros., traveling to New York several times a week to inspect and purchase tomatoes that were being imported from Cuba.

“My job was to drive a truck to New York, inspect the tomatoes, go up to the auction to buy them and then load the tomatoes, drive back to Philly and unload the truck and then I would get ready to go back to New York again,” he said. “Sometimes if I didn’t have enough sleep, I would go to New York on a train, sleep on the train and hire a truck to bring tomatoes back. I did this for five or six years before I hired others to handle it.”

Procacci has seen profound changes in the produce industry during his 65-year career, but he points to palletization and improvements in transportation as two that stand out in his mind.

“When I first started, each package was handled by hand,” he said. “When we progressed to palletization, that was huge for us, as it allowed us to increase volume and efficiency.”

Regarding transportation, early in his career rail transport dominated, before giving way to trucks. “We would buy tomatoes from California and ship them by rail,” he said. “We used to get a carload [by rail] in six to seven days. Now with trucks, we can get product in three or four days.”

While Procacci Bros. eventually expanded beyond tomatoes and began handling other items, such as strawberries and potatoes, the company is still best known for tomatoes, and specifically for grape tomatoes and its proprietary UglyRipe heirloom-style tomatoes.

Regarding the grapes, Procacci said he first saw them in a retail store in Philadelphia and “they were the best-tasting tomatoes I ever had.” After speaking with the Florida-based grower, he found out that the seed was from Taiwan, so he traveled there in 1998 and struck a deal with the seed company for worldwide exclusivity on the seed variety.

As for UglyRipes, the variety was developed in about 2002 by Procacci’s research and development team, which includes four PhD-level staff scientists who work to develop and refine varieties. As the name implies, the tomatoes are not the prettiest tomatoes, but they are some of the best-tasting around, channeling the homegrown goodness consumers have come to appreciate.

Tom Stenzel, president and chief executive officer of the United Fresh Produce Association, which will honor Joe Procacci with its Produce Legend Award Jan. 21 at its Winter Leadership Meeting in Miami, recalls joining the association in 1993 and meeting Procacci shortly thereafter.

“One thing that always struck me about Joe Procacci is that he was always willing to do what the customer wanted,” said Stenzel. “His customer service was always something that I admired greatly.”

Additionally, Stenzel said that Procacci was something of an industry trailblazer in government relations.

“Here was a guy who knew both senators from Pennsylvania on a first-name basis, and who could speak with any of his congressmen or the mayor of Philadelphia at a moment’s notice,” Stenzel added. “Before anyone did those kinds of things, he knew how important it was to be involved politically. And he showed other members of our board how important that was.”

Al Murray, deputy secretary of the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, who has known Procacci for many years and recalls a time when he visited the Procacci Bros. offices with former New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture Art Brown.

“Joe Procacci invited us to tour his Philadelphia operations, and as you pass through the main floor of his sales area amid all the phones ringing, voices talking and the clatter of business machines, you enter Joe’s office and as he shuts his door and the clatter of the business world dissipates,” said Murray. “One can immediately feel the ‘old world style’ sink in. Nothing is hurried, and as a guest, you are Joe’s main focus. He makes sure you have a cup of coffee and something to eat. He asks about you, your family and he really means it.

“After a period of time, we leave his office and start the tour,” Murray continued. “One thing that is striking is that Joe knows the name of every employee we encounter. We enter one of his plants where they are repacking tomatoes. There must be 20 employees on the line, and Joe knows every one of their names. He inspects what they are packing, makes a few suggestions and then moves on. In the course of the tour, in answering one of our many questions, he mentions that his company is the largest landowner in South Philadelphia. He’s not bragging, just explaining the scope of his operations. He exudes a certain humbleness that shows he has never forgotten his roots, yet you can sense the intense internal drive that fueled him to become an industry giant.”

Procacci is always willing to fight for causes in which he believes. Stenzel recalled that back in 1995, the Food Marketing Institute launched an effort to abolish the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act, which gives priority status to shippers during bankruptcy cases.

“It was interesting to me, because he was right in the middle of the fight between shippers and retailers,” Stenzel said. “At times he was a receiver and at other times he was a seller, but he was always able to speak to the value of PACA. It didn’t matter if you were a buyer or seller, he thought the standards of fair trading needed to be retained.

“The final legislative solution came down to changing the fee, but it was not killed, even though many people thought it might be,” Stenzel continued. “So he was definitely instrumental in preserving the PACA.”

Procacci recalls the battle with FMI well, and considers it one of the highlights of his career.

“When I was on the board of United back in 1995, our industry was threatened by FMI when they wanted to repeal the PACA, and they had all the chain stores behind them,” said Procacci. “They were looking at the cost of the license, which was nominal, but what they were really looking at was to not be subject to the PACA because it protected the shippers. And we wanted to retain the act because there were a few multi-, multi-million dollar bankruptcies. I was fully behind retaining the PACA, and I lobbied in Washington for several days. Finally United made an agreement with the FMI retailers to not charge too much for the license. Without the PACA, this industry would be tough to operate in.”

Another battle Procacci undertook was in 2007, when he fought to have his UglyRipe tomatoes available to consumers outside Florida throughout the year. The Florida Tomato Committee, with the backing of a federal marketing order, contended that the UglyRipes did not meet the standards for appearance because they were misshapen, and shipping them outside Florida during the winter season would hurt the reputation of Florida tomatoes.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture eventually amended the marketing order and UglyRipes were permitted to be shipped year round, and Procacci considered it a victory for U.S. consumers as well.

“Thanks to the USDA, consumers can now have the mid-summer goodness of tomato season all year round,” Procacci was quoted as saying.

Reggie Brown, manager of the Florida Tomato Committee, recalled the legal battle and his opposition to Procacci.

“Joe Procacci is a powerful force on the production side and was a tenacious opponent in the UglyRipe tomato issue,” Brown said. “He and I spent some time a few years ago in Federal Court in Philadelphia when he sued the secretary of agriculture, and he was a consummate gentleman the entire time. Even in that struggle, he understood the role that each of us was playing and I respect him a great deal for that. And there’s not a tomato man around that would argue that he is not a legend in the business, and we congratulate him on this particular honor [of being named a Produce Legend].”

Asked what advice he would give young people entering the produce industry, Procacci answers without hesitation and zeros in to the heart of the company’s PRIDE core values: Integrity.

“I think produce is the greatest business and industry in the country because you have to be truthful and honest to your customers and the shippers,” he said. “We don’t sign contracts, everything we do here is based on trust. If you want to move up, you need to be honest and you have to have integrity.”

Regarding being named a Produce Legend by United Fresh, Procacci said it is a great honor.

“It means a lot to me,” he said. “I have received several awards in my lifetime, but this is the biggest one. To be recognized with people like Bob Grimm, Reggie Griffin and Frieda Caplan is a tremendous honor.”