Dream season turns into nightmare for Manatee tomato growers. It could be good news for you
No county in Florida grows more tomatoes than Manatee. But the market has collapsed, turning a dream season into a nightmare.
At least one Palmetto packing house is selling a 25-pound box for $5 to the public.
Tuesday, Pacific Tomato Growers, 503 10th St. W., Palmetto, put out hand-written signs outside their packing house announcing the sale.
Wednesday, a steady stream of cars pulled into the Pacific Tomato Growers parking lot to buy a box or two of Roma or round tomatoes. Andrew Blanck bought six to make tomato sauce and Greek sauce.
“We sell tomatoes all over the country. We sell to restaurants, and retail customers, too,” Paul Hoker, Pacific’s chief financial officer, said. “The restaurant business has gone away.”
The culprit is the coronavirus pandemic which has shuttered many restaurants or forced others to scale back to take-out operations only.
Until retiring in January, Gary Reeder had grown tomatoes in Manatee County for 45 years. Although now out of the tomato business, he still serves as president of the Manatee County Farm Bureau.
“A lot of our product goes to New York, Philadelphia and Boston, and we can’t get truck deliveries,” Reeder said.
New York now leads the United States in COVID-19 cases.
“It’s a weird deal,” Reeder said of how tomato growers were having one of their most profitable seasons in years, until the pandemic forced them to cut back.
The idea for selling tomatoes at $5 a box at Pacific came from line supervisor Sandi Sommerfeldt, who thought that was a better plan than the alternative.
“In desperate times you have to do something out of the ordinary. We are not selling a whole lot now.,” Sommerfeldt said. “I grew up on a farm in Michigan. If we couldn’t sell, we went to the street and sold out of our pickup or on the road.”
All of the product has been mechanically loaded into the boxes and sanitized, Steve Mixon, Pacific’s assistant controller, said. A Pacific worker loads the tomatoes, one box, or more, into the customer’s car.
The price of the tomatoes is actually less than the cost of production, and Pacific wanted to offer its tomatoes to the public at a bargain price, Hoker said.
Last week, Bob Spencer, president of West Coast Tomato in Palmetto, said business has also fallen off due to the slackening of demand from restaurants.
“The major concern is keeping people healthy. We have to have an economy and it is our hope and prayer that the economy gets going. We are playing it one day at a time,” Spencer said.
Although tomato farmers have been hit hard by the pandemic, other Manatee County growers, such as potato farmer Allen Jones and grove operators supplying citrus products to juice makers like Tropicana, have seen an increase in demand.
This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 2:01 PM.
