After almost a century of business, Castroville, Calif.-based Ocean Mist Farms branched out into a new product. The company’s purple artichoke is now in its third harvest and doing well.
“Over the next three months, the company will focus on purple artichokes and [our] artichoke program,” said Diana McClean, senior director of marketing for Ocean Mist Farms. “It will include an emphasis on the nutritional value of the artichoke.”
The company is a fourth-generation, family-owned business and a large grower of fresh artichokes. It will celebrate its 100th anniversary soon.
Its full line of over 30 fresh vegetables includes the Season & Steam and Organic product lines. The company anticipates similar harvests and volume compared to last year, according to McClean.
“We are proud of our Season & Steam line of vegetables at Ocean Mist Farms. Season & Steam now includes five new additions to the microwavable cut-vegetable product line,” McClean said. “The line includes 10 varieties, each with the same customizable seasoning and resealable bag shoppers love.”
The new varieties include broccoli florets, floret medley, vegetable medley, cauliflower florets and cauliflower rice. The existing varieties include sweet baby broccoli, artichokes, whole Brussels sprouts, Brussels sprout shreds and Brussels sprout halves.
While Ocean Mist’s Season & Steam line is relatively new, the company has been growing organic produce for over 20 years and has had its Organic brand for seven years.
The company features a wide variety of organic produce that is shipped year-round. Since 2000, it has been cultivating organic artichokes, and in 2015, the Ocean Mist Organic brand was introduced with a full line of vegetables, including leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, fennel, herbs and spinach, McClean said.
The challenges of the pandemic have made companies do business in new ways. The priorities multiplied and traded places as the top current concern any given week.
McClean said the most challenging aspects of business of late have been labor and inflation.
To manage the tight labor market, Ocean Mist works to attract and retain domestic workers and is recruiting more temporary agricultural program, or H-2A, labor from Mexico for harvest, according to McClean.
Those are solutions to the labor shortage. Though, the company has also found a way to deal with the shortage of trucks and inflation’s effect on gas prices.
“For the past two years, we have built a carrier portfolio to maximize service levels,” McClean said. “While we have seen costs increase as a reflection of gas prices, overall, we are fulfilling all delivered order requests and working with our fob customers to ensure their trucks are maxed out to capacity to help combat the increase in trucking costs.”
