State Garden: People, Planet, Produce

What is your earliest memory of your family business?

My earliest memory is of my mother driving my two brothers and me to Chelsea, Massachusetts, where my father was working. She would pile the three of us in her old wood-panelled station wagon and drive us to visit him for lunch. I remember just watching him work. He struck me as a man who enjoyed getting his hands dirty every day.

When I joined the family business years later, we worked together in the same facility, and the company hadn't grown much since I was a child. My dad and my aunt ran the business after my grandfather stepped down, so it felt no different than getting the family together on a Sunday for dinner — except, of course, we focused on business.

One of the things my father would always remind us of — whether he was discussing a customer, an employee, or a supplier — is how good they've been to us. This meant that he fully appreciated the commitment that makes an employee show up to work for 50 or 60 hours a week for the benefit of the company. And he made us understand that people can get paychecks anywhere, but what they want most is to feel valued; this is something else that's stuck with me.

How did State Garden get into organic produce?

When we entered the pre-washed salad business in the early 2000s, approximately 90-95 per cent of State Garden's produce was conventionally grown, and five per cent was organic. That segment of the company was very small, selling only around two loads a week of baby lettuces, spring mix, baby spinach and arugula, but my brothers and I understood that the potential for growth was tremendous.

Sourcing organic produce was the first obstacle standing in our way. Organic farmers can't use conventional pesticides to protect their crops, and so they risk losing entire harvests to pests. Also, organic certification requires that fields be left fallow for three years to allow the soil to lose any trace of the synthetic products that previous non-organic crops were treated with.

Our suppliers were understandably reticent. It took the three of us several trips out west before we could convince them to make the shift to organic, thereby enabling our transition. And regardless, they wouldn't have done so if we hadn't been dealing fairly with them for decades: they had to trust us, and they did.

We then had to concentrate on the consumer-facing side of the business. I quickly learned that the customer base for organic produce wants to know that the company they're buying from is true to their values and principles. So, we needed to brand the company in a way that represented both who we already were and who we wanted to be.

We tried several different concepts, from the Big Red Barn Company to the Earthy Crunchy Salad Company, but none of them resonated with us. Then, one day, a co-worker walked into my office and said that she was tired of watching us fumble around with the idea. "What's your daughter's name?", she asked, and I replied, "Olivia." She said, "Isn't 'Olivia's Organics' a nice idea?"

We immediately knew that this was an opportunity to champion our values and ethics. It was a fresh look – the branding was vibrant, and it really stood out on the shelf.

We decided to launch the Olivia's Organics Children's Foundation at the same time, which gave us a philanthropic mission in tandem with the business endeavour. The Foundation soon became very active in the Greater Boston Food Bank, donating to children's cafes and school lunch programmes – something that I believe generated increased customer support.