Quebec wholesaler moves to iceless broccoli shipments

Gaétan Bono Fruits et Légumes, a wholesaler of fresh produce in Eastern Canada, recently announced a partnership with Verdant Technologies to introduce its HarvestHold Fresh product into fresh broccoli shipments.

Samuel Fasulo, senior produce and sales buyer for Gaétan Bono Fruits et Légumes, said the company began to engage with Verdant Technologies following conversations with retailers about new initiatives or innovations and Fasulo said HarvestHold came to mind.

“They had just an open discussion about new initiatives that the chain stores are looking into to try to eliminate ice and water damage in their facilities,” he said.

Also of keen interest, Fasulo said, was eliminating slips and calls and damage to the company’s epoxy floors from water.

Fasulo said Francis Carruthers, food safety director at Gaétan Bono Fruits et Légumes, worked with Verdant Technologies to understand which growers already used HarvestHold, and he said the team at Gaétan Bono Fruits et Légumes was pleased to learn that a large grower partner already worked with Verdant Technologies.

Gaétan Bono Fruits et Légumes did trial HarvestHold Fresh against the traditional method of shipping with ice, but Fasulo said workers don’t necessarily want handle 50-pound boxes of broccoli and ice. Then there are security issues with water safety and integrity.

“Our industry is getting a little bit more delicate with what's in the water, what's in the ice,” he said. “We're [also] finding it harder to get people to want to work and pick up a 25- or 50-pound box. It's tough to get just employees wanting to do that manual labor today. You know? The other thing is security; ... [T] he list was on and on and on.”

Fasulo said the additional benefits include less freight, especially when shipping from California to Canada and more boxes per truckload. He said receivers handling the product also enjoy the benefit of not handling melting ice and any damage that water might present or risks of falls from staff. He said retailers that work Gaétan Bono Fruits et Légumes also had positive feedback.

“We did see a good initial interest from our customer base, at a retail standpoint,” he said, noting independent retailers are more accustomed to the traditional broccoli shipped on ice. “I think the more that we grow in carrying this product, ... there will be more of a trust factor. Knowing that everybody's got it. Everybody trusts it. If all the chain stores, all the big wholesalers have it, then this product should be working.”

Matthew Aronson, chief revenue officer at Verdant Technologies, said the partnership with Gaétan Bono Fruits et Légumes is part of a broader expansion of Verdant Technologies in Canada, including a partnership with Sobeys last year, and that awareness of HarvestHold is starting to take off in the country. He said it’s been a natural progression from retailer to grower-partners to wholesale.

“From some of that initial adoption on the retail side, as that has continued to grow, and the grower base comes along with that, and then that natural next domino is the wholesale part of the market as wholesalers serve those retailers,” he said.

Aronson said as Verdant Technologies continues to add partners in Canada, the company seeks to expand HarvestHold use in the U.S.

“That’s where we see a lot of opportunity,” he said. “We have some great partners that have used and experienced the benefits of our product. I think the U.S. presents its own kind of unique challenges and opportunities with, in many cases, a lot of the same growers involved. There's a lot of good overlap there, but how the product is sourced? You've got a much more fragmented retail environment in the U.S. compared to the more consolidated market in Canada.”