Food Safety
First things first, the foundation that needs to be in place before anyone plays ball in the fresh food industry is food safety. If you don’t have a rigorous food safety program, then you will not be in business long. We always start by making sure this foundation is in place and a supplier’s program is well-run and managed- exceeding the baseline standards. Our customers also come to us with their own food safety requirements, so as a supplier is being assessed, our team merges the parameters and requirements together resulting in a food safety program well beyond a healthy baseline.
Quality
The second thing we look at is the list of items a customer needs and find the growers who are best at each item. Our customers typically need a full list of produce and not just one item. Part of the Fresh Avenue model allows us to work with one provider that specializes in fresh cut lettuce, then a provider who is phenomenal with cilantro and parsley, and adding in the grower with the industry-leading Brussel sprouts expertise, etc. Many times growers find the produce they are passionate in growing and excel with them, so naturally this is the grower to source from, that excels in produce quality.
Customer Fit
One area that we focus on that brings the most success is customer fit. This is probably the biggest secret to a successful program is finding the grower that fits. This may or may not be the biggest name in the industry. Again, this is where we focus on mid-sized growers that are best in class. However, for many of our customers there’s a balance between suppliers that are big and capable enough to fill orders, but are small enough to care about each customer and provide a phenomenal customer touch.
Putting it All Together
It’s almost impossible to quantify how much of each of these areas result in the perfect produce program… each customer is different with different food safety programs, specs, wish list of items, and delivery routes. Great produce sourcing however starts with each of these integral components in building a program, however the quantity of each of those ingredients is tailored to each customer. It’s the same phenomenon of grandma’s signature cookies… she may have used the recipe off the Toll House package of chocolate chips, but it was her extra pinch of this and heaping scoop of that which made her cookies memorable and so good. That’s where our team begins with conversations, calls, tests, visits, and continuous refinement until finally the program perfectly fits into a customer’s menu and brand values.
