South Jersey

Tour the fertile South Jersey region, catching up on the hottest growing, buying, and selling trends as the state’s Department of Agriculture celebrates its centennial year. Comprised of the Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Salem, and southern Ocean counties, this region is bustling with ‘buy local’ demand, multicultural influences, a movement to vertical growing, and celebrating its prime locale.

What’s Hot?
If you ask grower-shippers or wholesalers what’s trending in South Jersey, you get a variety of answers—largely centered around the assortment of fruit and vegetables grown in the eight counties listed above.

Locally Grown: Yep, We Got That
“The local movement is still predominant; everyone wants to sup­port local, regional growers,” says Robert Von Rohr, director of marketing for Glassboro-based Sunny Valley International, Inc., which buys locally and also imports and exports.

According to Al Murray, retiring Assistant Secretary of Agriculture and director of New Jersey’s Division of Marketing and Development, buyers love the interesting heirloom varieties that South Jersey growers are producing. Instead of going to the grocery store and finding only a purple eggplant, customers are enticed by a number of locally grown options such as striped and Chinese varieties of eggplant.

An interesting twist is vertical growing in the area. New Jersey’s entire land base is 4.8 million acres, 700,000 of which are farms, and 2 million forest. With over half the state covered in forest and agriculture, growers have found innovative ways to deal with finite space.

To continue living up to its nickname as the ‘Garden State,’ growers are now “going into industrial cities that are decaying and taking over factories. Instead of growing out, we’re growing up,” Murray explains, with farmers dabbling in vertical greenhouse/warehouses to grow hydroponically.

For Thomas Sheppard, president of Eastern Fresh Growers in Cedarville, it’s all about proximity. He emphasizes the many positives brought about by the ‘buy local’ movement, especially the 56 million people living within 150 miles of South Jersey. For growers, knowing their seasonal crops will be snapped up at farmers’ markets and retailers makes the annual challenges worthwhile.

Dave Budd, former president of Wood-bury’s Gloucester County Packing Company, points out how the state’s marketing program, Jersey Fresh, has been immensely successful in promoting the state’s produce, well beyond state lines.

Bill Nardelli of Nardelli Brothers, Inc. agrees. “Over the past five to ten years, locally grown has taken a strong foothold around the country and our producing areas,” he confirms. This, he notes, benefits Jersey growers and helps them compete against Western suppliers.

Volume & Value
Current trends in packaging have coincided with consumer demand for increased volume and more value-added options that combine freshness and convenience.

Von Rohr finds conventional supermarkets are seeking larger packs of items like blueberries and believes the reasoning behind the push is two-fold: smaller grocers are hoping to compete with club stores’ volume packaging, while consumers are looking for fruits with high antioxidant levels to bolster their health.

Budd voiced similar thoughts, high-lighting that consumers “are looking for things that are nutritious, healthy, and quick and easy to prepare.” While the trend is not new, both Von Rohr and Budd believe demand for these ready-to-eat, value-added products will continue to expand and include a broader variety of fruits, vegetables, and mixed commodity packs.

“The last four years we’ve seen growth in kale, romaine, and fresh herbs,” explains Ryan Flaim, managing member at Vineland-based R&R Flaim Next Generation Produce, LLC. Flaim believes the rise is linked to the “health movement with more people choosing fresh vegetables and cooking.”

Sustainability & Organics
“We try to use disease resistant seed anywhere we can,” comments Flaim, whose team is currently working with Rutgers University “to develop any new measures that will take us down an avenue away from pesticides, which is beneficial to the community, to the health of the consumer, and to us because pesticides are so costly.”

Eastern Fresh Growers has put green initiatives in place by switching to recyclable nonwax boxes for every commodity, and utilizing cover crops on all land according to Sheppard. Recently, the grower-shipper added daikon radish to its product mix, which he says allows for better soil penetration while also returning nutrients to the soil.

“We’re always looking at ways to be more sustainable, whether it’s in water usage or transportation,” points out Nardelli. Being good to the environment is a simple precept, he says, “because it’s our business.”

The demand for organic produce has also continued to rise. Murray sees organics as a major growth category; certified organic acreage has climbed steadily in the state. Sheppard concurs, noting growers have added more organic commodities to their lineups, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. It’s “a good thing,” Sheppard says, but cautions “there are limitations, we can’t over-produce for the market.”

Sure Things
Those in Jersey’s fresh produce industry have much to be thankful for—especially that real estate mantra of location, location, location. To champion this sublime geographic advantage, Murray quotes Ben Franklin who described the state as ‘a barrel tapped at both ends’ with Philadelphia right next door and New York City to the north. The proximity to major cities eliminates expensive transportation costs, and all manner of fruits and vegetables can be “grown, packed, shipped, and on a retail shelf that afternoon,” Murray says.

“Jersey is a great region,” enthuses Nardelli. “We’re right here next to the Atlantic Ocean which gives us warmer temperatures.” Adding in the excellent soil, climate, and access to major cities “gives us a really great foothold to ship produce.”

John Molinelli, president of John Molinelli, Inc., also sees the locally grown trend as a benefit to growing in the area. “Fresher is one of the biggest selling points,” he confirms, with so many urban and suburban consumers close by (including 6 million people in Philly, 11 million in New York City, and 9 million in New Jersey).

FRESH FORUM
Are your suppliers or customers concerned about the new Food Safety Modernization Act rules going into effect this year?

Ryan Flaim,
R&R Flaim Next Generation Produce, LLC
I’m concerned as a family farm. We’re not a big California grower that can absorb the costs; the regulations will really hurt. Food safety and the responsibilities we have with chain stores are very costly because of paperwork… It’s important, but it eats into so much of an already-slimming bottom line because of overhead going up.

Dave Budd, 
Gloucester County Packing Company
With our own packinghouse, we’ve done third-party audits for a long time. The important issue is that food safety is customer driven and customers want it now. They could care less what the FDA [Food & Drug Administration] is doing; they want the highest level immediately. Many of our customers have their own auditors and inspectors and we’ve encouraged all of our growers to get certified.

Bob Von Rohr,
Sunny Valley International, Inc.
All of the growers we represent domestically have to be GFS Primus certified for food safety and traceability, which is top of the line. With the import deal, [our suppliers] are GlobalGAP, and we’re still working out the bugs.

John Molinelli,
John Molinelli, Inc.
We follow food safety guidelines for the growers we use; we’re really pretty strict on what we do. It’s going to be a little tough to get everyone acclimated, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on where we’re supposed to be.

Al Murray,
New Jersey Department of Agriculture
They are, and it’s a complaint. We have a partnership with Rutgers University, our agriculture university in the state. We do the audits, they do the training. We’ve trained over 4,000 in food safety and were the first state to be certified by the USDA to do food safety audits. Our farmers are poised for the Food Safety Modernization Act; they don’t like it, but we’re ready to go. Nobody likes to have the do the paperwork, but if they’re going to sell fresh fruit and vegetables, then they have to follow these requirements.

Thomas Sheppard,
Eastern Fresh Growers, Inc.
Customers are a lot more intense [about food safety] than the legislation coming along. It’s been voluntary, but we’ve been doing it because our customers require it. It’s not going to be new to us.

Bill Nardelli,
Nardelli Brothers, Inc.
We’ve been doing USDA and Primus for many years with our company and shipping facilities. We’re initiating and already practicing many of the requirements, so it will be a very smooth transition.

Tim Wetherbee, New Jersey Blueberry Industry Advisory Council & Diamond Blueberry
There’s some concern; I don’t think it’s anything we can’t handle… I look at it as a plus because it helps ensure a better and safer product. We’ve come to realize it’s as good for us as it is for the consumer.

Due to New Jersey’s central location in serving multiple metropolitan areas, the state is highly multicultural, and the produce output reflects this diversity. Murray says New Jersey has the second largest Cuban population outside Miami, with growers producing Cuban vegetables alongside other culturally-influenced commodities to meet the climbing de-mand of expanding African, Portuguese, and Asian markets.

Labor Status
Labor continues to present an ongoing obstacle for New Jersey’s produce industry, which Sheppard considers the biggest challenge for anyone harvesting “hand-labor intensive crops.”

Tim Wetherbee of the New Jersey Blueberry Industry Advisory Board, and a grower himself with Diamond Blueberry, agrees. “Labor shortages are an issue, but are in pretty much all of agriculture.”

According to Von Rohr, the majority of the state’s growers participate in the H-2A visa program sanctioned by the government, which is supposed to minimize problems associated with bringing guest workers into the United States to work the fields. Sheppard concedes the federal H-2A program is a good source of labor, but expensive, noting it costs $11.29 per hour for a guest worker as opposed to paying the state’s minimum wage of $8.30 per hour.

A bright spot in the struggle for labor is mechanization. Von Rohr has seen Jersey blueberry growers turning away from hand-sorting to high-tech machinery, utilizing computerized packing lines to inspect the fruit by color, size, and density, and eliminating the need for as many workers. “Technology does a better job because what the eye misses, a computer can pick up,” he says.

Wetherbee confirms the efforts to mechanize more phases of the growing, harvesting, and packing process. The bad news: “It takes time,” he notes, “it’s not something done overnight.” But the better news is how “technology is improving all the time. When we pack, blueberries go through cleaners and scanners that remove off-color or soft fruit, which makes a much better pack.”

The addition of forced-air cooling is helping prolong shelf-life too. “It wasn’t as available years ago, but is pretty much the norm now,” Wetherbee notes.

Future Success
The South Jersey produce region’s benefits are many—including multicultural influences, a prime blueberry-producing climate, and the ability to acclimate and evolve with shifting trends.

“What’s exciting is our farmers have always adapted and changed through market conditions in order to stay viable,” comments Murray. “We’re not a one crop kind of state,” he says, and this is clearly evident in the vibrant mix of produce the industry exports and serves to nearby metropolises.

Despite typical challenges, the region is truly bursting with the successes of fertile cropland, geographic advantages, and a thriving locally grown trend that continues to gain ground.