Editor’s note: This is the first in a five-part series on Oasis Dates that examines how to build an iconic brand in produce from the ground up.
Disruption in the produce aisle isn’t a lightning strike; it’s built on strategic, operational and foundational discipline. For Oasis Dates CEO Adam Cooper, disrupting the date category means applying fundamental principles he honed over eight years as head of marketing for The Wonderful Company, where he helped steer the multibillion-dollar Wonderful Pistachios, Wonderful Halos and POM Wonderful portfolios.
Cooper is now applying that blockbuster blueprint for transforming commodities into household essentials to a new frontier: the date category.
For this first installment of The Packer’s “Blueprint for Building an Iconic Produce Brand,” we sat down with the CEO to unpack the operational and marketing mechanics of category transformation. Now three years into his tenure at Oasis, Cooper is proving that before you can set a retail category on fire, you have to build a solid foundation.
“Over the eight years that I led marketing at Wonderful, we launched new brands like Wonderful Halos, Wonderful Seedless Lemons and we built and continued upon the growth of Wonderful Pistachios and the POM Wonderful portfolio,” says Cooper. “Being part of that growth was very informative to me as I thought about how we lead — not only brands — but organizations that can become iconic in produce.”
Cooper says the key ingredients to building an iconic brand are team, capabilities and culture.
“And those things don’t happen overnight,” he says, adding that the story of Oasis Dates is also one of a startup.
“It takes time to do this,” he says. “You have to make sure you research who the consumer is, that you understand what matters to your customers, and then you find great people to help bring the vision to life.”
The Team
Cooper emphasizes that a diverse and agile team is the foundational starting point. Over the past few years, Oasis Dates has deliberately constructed a powerhouse team combining deep expertise in the date industry, produce sales and consumer packaged goods marketing.
Bringing together a team from varying professional backgrounds injects vital perspective into the business, says Cooper.
“As an executive team, we constantly push ourselves and challenge each other to what we call, ‘steal with pride’ — bring ideas in, no matter where they’re from, whether they’re outside of our company from our past experiences, or we see somebody else in a different industry doing something disruptive. We are constantly inspired to find new ideas and keep that positive-growth mindset.”
Cooper has recruited an executive dream team designed to push the boundaries and drive the date category that includes Hector Altamira, Greg Kurkjian and Deb Origel.
Altamira, CEO of Oasis Date Commercial, is the former CEO of Natural Delights at Bard Valley, and has spent over a decade in the date industry across various roles.
“Our biggest goal is to gain distribution to position Oasis Dates as the first name people think of when it comes to dates,” says Altamira. “To do that, we need to fulfill our commitments to our customers on quality, timing and reliability to build the brand our consumers can trust and count on for all their date needs.”
Kurkjian, vice president of sales, has over 30 years of experience building sales organizations, launching new consumer brands and product concepts across North America in roles at Fresh Express, Ready Pac, Fit Fruit and Vegetable Wash, Mann Sunny Shores and IFCO Reusable Plastic Containers.
“I bring a classic consumer package goods conceptual selling model to Oasis Date, which has been modified to accommodate the unique challenges of a perishable product,” he says.
Origel, senior director of marketing, has spent over 15 years working on consumer brands across the food and beverage industry, leading brand strategy, innovation, consumer insights and integrated marketing for companies like The Coca-Cola Co., The Wonderful Company, Dole Packaged Foods and Impossible Foods.
“Our biggest goal in year one is a successful launch and keeping that momentum,” says Origel, who aims to bring that CPG sensibility to fresh produce. “That means ensuring every touchpoint, from the product and packaging to our retail execution and marketing, is ready to deliver a high-quality and meaningful consumer experience.”
Once on shelves, Origel says the goal is to build a brand with long-term staying power by introducing more consumers to “everything that makes medjool dates great,” from the taste to versatility and nutritional benefits.
“Bringing in all these different mindsets and experiences forces us to think differently,” says Cooper. “That’s really the key as we think about the cultural element. It’s important to have the team, but you need a culture that empowers people to take risks, to try new things, and do it in a collaborative way that really pushes the boundaries of what is currently being done.”
Capabilities and Vertical Integration
Beyond human capital, Cooper points to vertical integration as a key competitive advantage.
“What I learned at Wonderful was vertical integration is a key enabler to tell a great brand story,” he says. “And that’s because you have full control of the product from the ranch to the store.”
Oasis Dates has scaled to back up this philosophy, establishing itself as North America’s largest vertically integrated date company, says Cooper. Growing over half the medjool dates in the U.S., Oasis boasts 5,000 acres, 250,000 date palm trees and a 500,000-square-foot processing facility.
“Vertical integration is fundamental to creating brands consumers can trust,” says Altamira. “We know firsthand that quality and food safety is something that needs to be controlled at every step of the process.”
Owning more of the process, from the farms to final distribution, allows Oasis more control to achieve the quality and consistency needed to build a reliable brand, Altamira says.
“We’re not waiting on third parties or external sources to get our product packed,” he says. “We control the process that allows us to make commitments to our customers and actually keep them.”
Cooper sees vertical integration as a core value proposition of Oasis Dates.
“I think what sets Oasis apart is that we offer retailers supply surety and operational surety,” he says. “Surety, because we grow everything ourselves and we pack in the U.S. As we look to grow demand for dates, Oasis Dates is uniquely positioned to supply this growth with retailers.”
A Brand-New Beginning
What’s in a name and how does it set the stage for an iconic produce brand?
The choice of the Oasis Dates brand name stems from a lesson learned under Lynda Resnick at The Wonderful Company: that words matter, and an iconic brand needs a meaningful story, says Cooper.
The name honors a rich agricultural heritage, drawing directly from the company’s Coachella Valley orchard, Oasis Date Gardens, where some of the very first medjool palm trees in the U.S. were planted over a century ago. Beyond historical significance, the word “oasis” serves as a literal and cultural metaphor: a lush, fertile haven hidden in an unexpected desert landscape.
By aligning the brand name with this imagery, it embeds an entrepreneurial ethos directly into the company culture — championing the spirit and effort required to seek out, uncover and nurture great things from the most unexpected places as the brand modernizes for the future, Cooper says.
Creating an iconic brand begins with a great product, and Cooper says the proof that medjool dates are a great product is their meteoric rise at retail.
“They are on fire in-store,” says Cooper, pointing to Circana data for the 52 weeks ending calendar year 2025, indicating that dried fruit has emerged as the fastest-growing snack category at 8% — outpacing snack bars, candy, fresh snack nuts, and salty snacks. Dates are driving this surge, accounting for an impressive 50% of that total dried fruit growth, he says.
Propelled by a 27% year-over-year revenue spike, dates have officially surpassed raisins, mangoes and other dried items to become the largest segment in the dried fruit category for the first time ever, says Cooper.
This explosive market growth provides the perfect runway for Oasis Dates’ upcoming marketing program, he says. At The Wonderful Company, Cooper saw strategic branding successfully pushed Wonderful Pistachios from under 20% household penetration to well over it, creating a billion-dollar brand. He plans to bring this same aggressive-growth mindset to the date category.
A Culture of Discipline and Disruption
Cultivating an organizational culture that balances long-term stability with aggressive innovation is also critical, says Cooper. Inspired by his time working with The Wonderful Company owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the executive strives to foster an environment at Oasis that balances discipline and disruption.
While discipline focuses on infrastructure, inclusivity and collaborative long-term growth, disruption requires a more competitive mindset. For Cooper, disruption means “playing to win and challenging assumptions, taking calculated risks, being entrepreneurial — being bold.”
Building an iconic produce brand requires a deliberate blend of operational discipline and market disruption, says Cooper. For Oasis Dates, the journey began in the fields, focusing heavily on data and information tracking. By leaning into experimental farming practices and investing in data tracking across all 250,000 of the company’s palm trees, the team established the rigorous baseline needed for continuous improvement.
This emphasis on discipline quickly expanded beyond the fields. Following the acquisition of Date Pack, the country’s largest date processing company, Oasis Dates’ priority shifted to rewiring the organizational culture, says Cooper. By empowering the processing team to challenge the status quo and voice new ideas, operations were rapidly modernized. This newly instilled operational rigor extended to safety protocols as well.
By introducing strict tracking and discipline around safety performance, workplace incidents were slashed by over 50% in just a couple of years, Cooper says.
And with a highly disciplined, data-driven foundation locked into place, the stage was set for true market disruption. The next step meant going back to the basics — launching a major consumer research study to uncover the core scientific evidence behind why dates are great, anchoring the brand’s future in hard data and consumer insight.
“Some of the things over the first couple years that were really important to me was establishing the discipline and the rigor of tracking, because you can’t get better unless you track, and so that was one of the biggest things we did early on — tracking what we’re doing in the fields, palm by palm, and then tracking even things like safety performance,” says Cooper.
Beyond assembling a stellar team with the capabilities needed to grow the business, Cooper set out to establish discipline across the organization, creating the foundation of ideas and insights that would then spark new ideas to help Oasis Dates disrupt in the future.
Looking ahead, Oasis Dates is heavily investing in both U.S. manufacturing and farming to cement its market leadership, says Cooper. By intertwining these fundamental operational strategies, he is confident the brand is on the path to transforming a traditional agricultural product into a household name.
“We’re really excited about what we’re building because we think the combination of the team, the capabilities, the culture and a great product will really help us create the next iconic brand in produce,” he says.
The Power of Disruption
Cooper says empowering a team to disrupt the status quo starts with leadership.
“The leadership team knows that we’re going to get the best ideas from people that are closest to where those opportunities are. A lot of times, that’s not us,” he says. “We needed to create a culture that started with the executive team but then cascaded down, and one of the ways that we did that was to develop and implement a management system that included two important pieces: One was a strategic planning process, which we called the ‘Oasis Roadmap,’ and then a set of core values.
“And the Oasis Roadmap guided our activities every year, and the core values guided our behaviors as an organization and team,” he continues.
Cooper says it was a broader leadership group that came together every year to establish the strategic priorities and agree to them as a team.
“Empowering starts by inviting people in — inviting people to come up with ideas and then actually allowing them to put them into practice,” he says.
Cooper says it’s a strategic planning process that forces everybody to decide what they want to spend time on that year.
“It’s hard to operationalize core values, and I learned at Wonderful different ways of doing that,” he says. “One of which was we embed our core values in our review process for our team members, and that means that not only are they evaluated on what they did that year but also how they did it.
“The how they did it was defined by those core values, making that become a way to operationalize the idea of empowering people to, No. 1, come up with ideas and decide on what matters to them, and then, No. 2, behave in a way that is going to make us proud and make us grow the company,” says Cooper.
As to how Cooper defines disruption, he says it’s about transformation.
“The way I think about disruption is challenging the assumptions, challenging the status quo, challenging things that somebody said five years ago we can’t do. It’s about pushing yourself to try new things,” he says. “It’s about taking calculated risks, and importantly, it’s about embracing dissent.”
Cooper says everyone needs a seat at the table to bring up ideas and identify new ways of approaching process in a better way.
“Why I find that to be really important within this idea of disruption, is that it forces you to think about an idea before you even launch it, and it often makes the idea better,” he says. “By encouraging and embracing dissent early in the process, you actually make the disruption even more meaningful.”
