Dec 4, 2008
Red Tomato Turns a Symbol into a Useful Reality

You have to think a little outside the box to understand Red Tomato.

First of all, Red Tomato is an organization that is only a little bit about red tomatoes. Red Tomato is a name, a symbol, really, meant to evoke the great idea of a well-colored, high-quality, vine-ripened, juicy, flavorful, locally grown, garden-fresh fruit or vegetable, as opposed to … the other kind.

About 40 fruit and vegetable growers in the Northeast use the Red Tomato symbol as a brand under which they sell apples, peaches, sweet corn, sweet cherries, pears, squash, lettuce, peppers and other fruits and vegetables and, yes, tomatoes, too – some of them heirloom.

Red Tomato is headquartered in Canton, Mass. It markets produce for farmers who hew to “high-end” quality standards and use Red Tomato as their wholesale distributor of fruits and vegetables to markets along the East Coast. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are important clients. C&S Wholesale Grocers also distributes Red Tomato products to a wide group of markets. There are several other firms distributing and selling Red Tomato produce.

Red Tomato serves its growers by brokering and arranging the sale and transportation of fruits and vegetables from farms to supermarkets. It is not a cooperative, but a democratic spirit of cooperation with its growers is a key part of the formula for success.

It buys from growers. Growers pack their own produce. Red Tomato pools it into loads and arranges for delivery to stores.

This year, it will sell about $3.1 million in products.

What is unusual is that Red Tomato is a nonprofit organization. Formed in 1996, it is the brainchild of Michael Rozyne, who founded it and now is co-director with Betty MacKenzie. Right from the beginning Red Tomato tackled complex ideas and used unconventional methods.

Ten years before he formed Red Tomato, Rozyne and two friends created Equal Exchange, a fair trade company looking to import tropical food products – especially coffee from Nicaragua – and paying decent prices to their small, foreign producers. Red Tomato is still one of the leading fair trade organizations, having expanded its products to cocoa and tea from the Far East. In 2006, Red Tomato, Equal Exchange and the Dutch organization AgroFair expanded the fair trade effort to bananas from Central and South America under the name Oke – a name meaning “OK, it’s a good deal for both sides.”

As a nonprofit organization, Red Tomato has been quite successful in obtaining grant money from organizations and foundations that try to build sustainable agricultural systems, foster organic farming, build local markets, work for fair trade or any of several concepts that change the way agriculture and agribusiness do business. In April, Red Tomato obtained a three-year grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for $655,000.

That was part of Kellogg’s “initiative to increase demand for ecologically grown, affordable fresh fruits and vegetables in the Northeast and provide major support for local food security by promoting the growth of sustainable agriculture,” according to a Kellogg Foundation press release.

“The grant will support Red Tomato’s work with a network of more than 40 fruit and vegetable farms in New England, New York and Pennsylvania,” according to the announcement. “A portion of the funding will also support a partnership between Red Tomato and the Georgia field office of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which works with farmers to develop and market fruit and vegetable crops to local markets in the Southeast.”

Red Tomato had worked to market, in the Northeast, watermelons produced by farmers organized in the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Albany, Ga. The Federation was formed by civil rights organizations in the 1960s to help African-American farmers stay in business. It currently serves 75 active cooperatives and credit unions from the Carolinas to Texas, involving more than 20,000 families, “most of whom could accurately be described as among the working poor,” according to the Federation’s Web site.

The partnership with the Federation grows out of the fair trade idea – not imported coffee but domestic seedless watermelons.

Red Tomato’s financial support from outside the marketplace helps it to educate consumers and develop markets, but that money does not directly result in higher prices to its growers. In that sense, “Red Tomato is a business formula that pays for itself,” Rozyne said.

Red Tomato also developed and markets under the Eco Apple brand, apples produced using “advanced” integrated pest management (IPM). Thirteen Red Tomato growers produce for Eco Apples.

In an interview, Rozyne agreed that IPM is a hard concept to sell, but Red Tomato works hard at it. A key part is educating customers about how producers use IPM to moderate their use of pesticides in apple production.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said of IPM.

A lengthy brochure explains the “Eco Apple Protocol,” describing the many things producers can do to lessen their impact on the environment while growing high-quality apples. Red Tomato has worked hard to develop the language, and customers have met it half way.

“Something’s happening out there,” Rozyne said. “People are hungry to learn about food and how their food is grown.”

This is important, he said, because IPM is the best approach for Red Tomato apple growers.

“Organic is nearly impossible to do commercially in the Northeast and produce apples at a supermarket standard and scale,” he said.

Some Red Tomato growers do produce lettuce, tomatoes, pumpkins and other produce using organic methods, but managing apple scab, plum curculio and codling moth in apple production has been extraordinarily difficult.

Red Tomato also works with scientists. The IPM protocols for the Northeast were developed with input by scientists the University of Massachusetts and Cornell University, and several of them serve as advisers on a board with growers.

Part of the idea is to approach consumers in a more sophisticated way, offering them science-based knowledge and making them feel more a part of the process and less “marketed to.”

One way to do that is with certification – which comes in part from scientific, university-verified information and also from the IPM Institute of North America, based in Madison, Wis., which certifies the growers’ use of certain sustainable practices. One of the harder-to-meet standards was implemented this year, Rozyne said – and that was the elimination of use of organophosphate insecticides, including Imidan and Guthion.

Red Tomato works in other ways to make customers feel they are doing the right things. Many people are concerned about the role undocumented workers play in food production, for example. Many of the Eco Apple growers employ H-2A workers, who are legally in the country under special visas.

Many consumers also want to have a more direct connection with the people who produce their food. While Red Tomato consolidates production from several farms to develop full loads for delivery, it works to maintain the individual identities of the farmers contributing to the load. The individual packages have Eco Apple and Red Tomato brand names and also contain a panel with information about the farm of origin. Farm profiles can also be read on the Red Tomato Web site.

“Our goal is to make products less like commodities by putting an individual farm identity on them,” Rozyne said.

Part of the Red Tomato concept comes from realizing that, while farmers’ markets and farm retail markets can be profitable options for some producers, 95 percent of the people go to supermarkets to buy their food. Red Tomato is a wholesale operation.

“Our goal is to help family farmers survive in a market dominated by global agribusiness,” according to the Red Tomato Web site, www.redtomato.org. “Our principal concern is the survival of small growers. We strive to pay a fair price to farmers that covers production costs and ensures that a grower will be around next year.”

Rozyne and Red Tomato have tried to do something about one persistent fact of agriculture: The middle-sized family farms that people most identify with are the ones going out of business. Small farms develop niches and large farms use methods that allow them to survive in the wholesale business, but mid-sized farms are neither big enough nor small enough.

“Medium-sized farms are still dying,” Rozyne said.

Red Tomato helps these farmers reach into supermarkets by consolidating their production and creating a quality image that brings better prices. By having growers package their own produce, they get to claim that part of the value-added profit for themselves as well.

Rising fuel costs have added to the price of food coming from other regions, and that has turned into better profit margins for Red Tomato growers – adding to the “buy local” effect.

Buy local is a combination of three ideas: “closer is fresher,” “I know and trust my farmer” and “I’m lowering my carbon footprint.” Red Tomato uses the catchy phrase, “Born and raised here” in combination with the Eco Apple idea.

Red Tomato is also committed to helping farmers educating the public through community outreach and consulting work. It uses grant dollars to achieve these goals.

Not everything Red Tomato tries works, Rozyne said.

“Five years ago, we had a total distribution thing going with warehouses and trucks, but we gave it up. Now, we coordinate the supply chain but we don’t own it.”




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