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Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, we're so excited to have John from our produce department, he's the one responsible for all of the delicious fresh organic produce you find in all of our stores, and he's gonna tell us what's in season and all about his passion for fruit and vegetables.

Plus, if you have mothers and want a chance to win a 100 gift card, you're gonna wanna listen carefully to the code word this week, and later we'll give you another one of mother's market and kitchen classic recipes.

But first up, we recently caught up with John from our produce department.

Now, if you've ever wondered what goes into the process of getting the finest organic produce in Orange County and some of the most flavorful varieties, do you've come to the right place? Because the man behind it all is our product manager, John, and we welcome him to the mother's market radio show. Let's start out by finding out a little bit about John and his history at mothers.

So John, how long have you worked for Mother's market?

I've worked from other's market for 17 years, so what is the difference in produce at mothers?

We take a lot of pride in the quality and freshness in the flavor, that is probably the most important thing that we do with mothers, is to ensure that we have the best product available with the best flavor.

Why are you so passionate about produce?

It's been a long time. I grew up in the produce business as a kid, and when I first looked at the business, I just said, Well, you know, I can do this, but I realized that it wasn't as easy as it looks. You have 300 different items possible you're working with, and each one takes a little different technique to keep it fresh in to stack it, and then beyond that, there's a massive amount of knowledge that goes back to our earliest days, you get to meet people that are passionate they can tell you what it was like when they were kids. Beyond my mother and father, it's just a wonderful industry, back 00 years ago, 95% of our economy came from agriculture as we've gone on today, it's very important, but it's not so much, but I find it challenging, not only you're working with people that are just passionate themselves grounded, but it's working with nature and supplying people with something that's real... To me, it's very gratifying, each week is a challenge, each day is a challenge, it's not what we did yesterday, it's what we're gonna do today, tomorrow, the weekend, and move forward to make it better, and it's always challenging to do that, so I always try to take on the point of saying, Hey, we're gonna give something better to the customer this week, we're gonna try something more for a company because that's what produce is about, 'cause you can always tell what you did, but what you haven't done is what's new and exciting.

Do you taste most things that come in... Yes, we do, and I not just take myself, I give it to some of my other produce managers and other people in the store that I consider to have great opinions on what is going on in the marketplace, and that ensures me that I have a wide broad just not my opinion, but other people's opinions, and living in the community I serve, I get a lot of feedback from the customer, which is just great, so that is something that is unique, and I enjoy very much hearing from my neighbors, customers, people I've known for 30 years, and it's important and wonderful to serve, can customers taste the produce in the store, we'll sample anything and everything, and mothers, when you walk in and you're not sure of something will gladly, and most of the time we have four or five different samples of things that we think are good that we're putting out daily, so who would I ask?

The manager is a good start, but if he's not there, any clerk will give us a sample, and that's pretty unique, most of the time you go in, you don't see much going on with sampling, demos and stuff like that, let loan somebody actually working in the department what are the trends with packaging organic, that has been something that's kind of like lagged behind the organic produce, because we haven't had a good processor, but now some of the bigger companies are coming up with value-added items which makes this much more convenient for, let's say a family to come in and need organic instead of having to buy bulk and then take the time right now. We're having it ready. It started, I guess, with packaged salads, now we have different combinations of vegetables that are ready to go, cut fruit juice products, so it is becoming more available as we go, and it adds a lot of value to the post department.

One nice thing is that mothers labels the produce by country of origin... Yes, I think that's a long time coming, people wanna know where it's grown, who grew it, what's in it, and I think that of just what it is or what's in it and how does it taste should be probably the first things that we look at and country of origin is very helpful to let the customer make a choice if they wanna just buy California only United States grown or something comes from their country, they'd like to know and support that, talk about your unique relationships with local farmers, it is unique because you know you need to have a little bit of volume to be able to deal with them, not every farmer is gonna grow everything for you and be able to mix and match together, those relationships are probably the most valuable... You actually work on the farmer schedule and when the stuff is right, and usually that relationship is the best, I can talk to him and encourage each other to actually raise the level of, Hey, this isn't quite ripe enough, we need to pick it a little bit cool it a little bit more... I have a little bit more ice on it, and you go back and forth, and also with the size of packaging may not work for you and certain items, he doesn't have a lot of that, he really doesn't offer the wide range being small, you might just get a lot of the little specialty items, which really makes us unique, and that relationship is the best, most of all farms that we do deal with, I've actually been to the farm, got to meet the people that owns it and stay on their land, and it's a really great relationship.

So do those farms supply the bigger stores, most of the time we're working with very small growers, but I will utilize the larger growers because they have volume, a lot of experience and a quality product.

Tell me about the process you go through to become organic, when you start organic, you must start with a three-year process, and we used to call that transitional, and that term came to be where it was not useful Because... Well, what's transitional... Is it commercial? Is organic, can we quantify the effects? Then we kinda went out with that and came in with a new deal that says, Okay, everything must be certified, now we have the USDA certification process, which takes three years to certify yourself organic, which means you must claim to be an organic processor when you first start get your certification from the state then, and then they give you a list of to-dos and what you can't do, what you can use, what you can't use, and in that process, you are trying to establish a record of what you've done and documented by tests on your soil, your packing facilities and so on and so forth, and at the end of the three-year term, you have a non-biased third party certified come in, do soil tests, check out your packing facility if you must have one, and then du certified organic USDA.

So that is, I think, the best thing going now, because we have everybody on the same level of certification instead of one country being different in the next, are there grades of produce?

Yes, there is. And you know, the grades of produce happens to be based on shape, size and color, mainly not so much on flavor, and that's something I've always pushed to say, hey, something can look great and can be super nice looking, but the flavor is not so good, so I think the flavor should rule in the business, not so much what it looks like, but obviously, if something's gonna taste good, it's probably gonna look good too, but not always the case, so we try to use the best grade possible, but we have flavor as our leading guide for what we do buy, so is that why you're so involved in tasting...

I can't always just go by look, if something looks great, well, it's gonna hold up forever, well, that's not the issue, it's like, Hey, what does the customer think when they taste it, and if it tastes great, that's what we're looking for.

Talk about the benefits of organic produce, what I would consider to be the benefit of organic is we have... There is some proof to the correlation of eating toxic chemicals and cancer... Okay, the amount of pesticides that are on a commercial product, not all the time, but we have seen a correlation to the use of pesticide and cancer in the United States, among one of the things, there's many things they can use like fungicides when it's raining too much different mineral components to bring out color and the organic business, you can't use those things... You have a bad crop. It's a bad crop. It's not gonna be sold. In the commercial industry, the bugs are flying all over the place, you can heavily spray and make this product look presentable to the market... In the organic market, you'll lose it.

Can you tell me about the freshness of the produce... Well, what we try to do is buy six days a week, we really don't like to warehouse product, so it's like a fire drill, every day we go out, we put our orders in, we bring it into their little... What we call a little loading facility, we build up the pallets and we ship it out to six stores that day, so the idea of where housing has never been something that mothers does, we try to buy it as fresh as possible, more or less trying to figure out when the farmer is gonna have it ready... Not saying, Hey, what do you have on hand? It's like, When are you gonna pick it? When it's gonna be ready and we try to correlate that to our stores needs, it may sound a little difficult, but it seems to be easier because it's a lot easier to work with the grower when he's ready and he has plenty of product and it's ready to ship, so we try to do the best job of ordering one day and shipping it out to the stores the next, so we're on a six-day cycle, which doesn't give us much time to warehouse anything, which I prefer because you constantly have to go back to the drawing board and say, Okay, what we did today is done, let's work on tomorrow, and on that point, you have to work around the weather, you might have a couple of storms coming in, so then you get to the farmer and say, Hey, how are we gonna get through this next couple of days, this looks tough, and by both of your ideas and knowing what the stores need, you come up with an equation, so what's in season right now this year has been very tough because it's been cold, which when it's called, everything grows slowly the farmers sometimes is forced to pick it early and the planning caps become bigger, so we're getting into spring and you think, Okay, things are normalizing, No, we're way behind planting, and the farmer is still in the deal of trying to pull this stuff out a little early that hurts the market. So as we go into summer, it sometimes doesn't catch up what's seasonal for spring is you're gonna see the great prop come out of the desert, melons coming out of the desert, which is right on the Colorado River here in California, Bradley. And then you're gonna see your earliest stone fruits from the Valley, we should see some peaches, neck Taran apricot is kind of an early crop, and we'll even see an early bloom on Cherry this year due to the cold temperature, most of all your crops that have been coming from south of the border will normalize, such as cucumbers, bell peppers, green beans, and tomatoes will all be locally grown, you know, it just really pulls almost everything into a locality where we can get it locally. May is great, we kind of shift from winter to spring, and then we go to summer, but spring brings back everything local and depending on the temperatures, we get some heat, we'll have some great teachers, great neck train. So it all of a sudden there's an onslaught of just numerous choices. We're getting some great information from John, and there's so much more to come, so please stay with us, and welcome back to the mother's radio show, and we wanna take some time now to remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can download the podcast from our website, mother's market dot com. Click the link for radio podcast and listen to our past shows. Plus, you can always download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now, back to our interview with our produce manager John, let's talk a little bit more about why mothers would carry commercial produce, why wood mothers carry commercial produce, which we all could have organic 100% of the time, but as it turns out, we have planting gaps and I usually run down my sources and try and try, so maybe I'll be out of an organic item one or two days before I go in to the conventional market because I still have the idea, Okay, I'm gonna give it one last effort and sometimes it takes a couple of days to try out all your sources and figured, Okay, this isn't working, so the customer still wants a choice, so I try to make the best educated choice I can to bring in that commodity, preferably organic, but when I can't, I will bring in a commercial item to substitute it for a very short time, and that seems to work well because a lot of the customers are... Some of our customers do not dictate organic at all, they just want some farm fresh produce, so we try to make that choice based on the availability, never... Never on price. It's always on quality.

What would you say about the value of organic produce?

I try to keep a fair, which I consider to be fear, pricing amongst what the industry standards are, and constantly looking at the chain stores which have massive amount of power and buying and try to keep my prices below theirs.

Does your relationship with growers help to get a value for the customer?

Yes, it does, especially when you're going back to them each and every day asking... And growers also have a deal where they need some help their long on product, they need you to move a little bit extra, so that is really how you gain the relationship of working with him on... Hey, you tell me what you wanna do and we'll make it work. And then sometimes you have to come back and say, Hey, I need something, I need a special price, 'cause I'm gonna do something special for my customer and they're there for you, so you can't always in the business, pick off a grower to a dictate, 'cause you have to take them from his beginning season to his middle to his end, and we all know the beginning of the season's tight, may not be quite ready, the middle is lash, everybody's there, but the end is also tight too, 'cause the quality may not be there, so sometimes you're having to work with us, because if you're always just taking his best crop, he's saying, Hey, I don't need this relationship, so that in itself is very touchy to be able to go through a season and have a copycat relationship with the grower because he needs you from the beginning, in the middle of the End and staying that path creates a wonderful relationship... Do we have an advantage with relationships locally?

Most definitely, I work... And by looking at the deals that the other big box doors are getting, I find that we are right there with them or below what they're getting when you are 600 store strong, you actually need to have so much product on board each and every day, and it's very hard to dictate price on that or quality, it's like, here's the deal, and well, these chain store guys are forced into it and kind of hand cuff when you're a little smaller, you may not need that. You may not need to say, Hey, okay, well, here's your price today, well, that is not gonna work for us today, that don't have the ability to look around for a few other small deals and put together some smaller deals, but sometimes being really big is not so good.

So John, what do you think about the customers at mother's... Mother's customers are some of the most wonderful... And that's another reason I love serving. They're always here to compliment you, but if something does not go right for them, they're always in to talk about it, which you listen to your customer, they make you a better retailer, and this customer is very knowledgeable, very, very knowledgeable about what they want, and they come in and say, Hey, this isn't so good. What can we do to make this better? So it forces me to work a little bit harder to police, 'cause we have some customers that are... Some are farmers themselves, but they find that this is a little bit easier for them to come in and buy a farm fresh deaf here at the store, and they love it, and they're very complementing to what we do for them, but Mother's customer not saying anything about any other customer? 'cause I haven't been with him for the last 17 years, it's just a great deal, we appreciate John taking the time to help us all understand about the great taste and selection available at mother's market, and we look forward to having a Mangan soon.Special savings.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show. And for shopping at mother's market.