A trading desk and an import book.

Rico's Produce buys and sells fresh produce every day. Loads move, markets move, and being in that flow is the only way to know what a commodity is genuinely worth this week, which regions are short, and which shippers are performing. A company that only writes annual programs loses that feel within a season.

But daily trading, on its own, cannot promise a retailer twelve months of a category. That takes contracts with growers, and contracts with growers take someone willing to carry what comes attached to the fruit: the hazard analysis nobody wants to own, the customs entry that has to be right, the organic certificate that has to survive three handoffs, and the grower who needs to be paid in fourteen days for a load that will not be sold for forty.

Most of the industry splits that up: someone to find the fruit, someone else for the customs entry, a consultant for the compliance file, a factor for the money, a carrier for the truck. Every split is a seam, and every seam is where a program fails.

We do both halves ourselves. We source direct from growers abroad and from domestic growing regions. We perform the FSVP hazard analysis and supplier verification with a Qualified Individual on our own staff. We hold our own USDA Organic Handler certification. We finance the purchase, the freight and the duty. And we move the load through seven gateways to anywhere in the country.

That is a heavier business to run than either half alone. It is also the only version where a buyer gets one phone number and a straight answer.