With roots in Silicon Valley, this century-old fruit business has ties to your cereal bowl

If you’re a dried fruit lover, you may have spotted the Mariani name in the supermarket aisle — and not just on bags of raisins or dried apricots. The 117-year-old Mariani Packing Company sells dried pineapple, mango and banana chips, too, and more cranberries than you could ever imagine.

Today, the Vacaville-based company is led by George Sousa Jr., the fourth generation to manage this family business with operations around the world. But it all started in 1906, when Croatian-born Paul Mariani followed his high school sweetheart and her family to Silicon Valley. The couple married, bought an orchard in Cupertino and opened a dried fruit business. It’s still going strong, having survived multiple moves and a shift to a global marketplace — and an if-only-we’d-known, missed opportunity to sell land to Apple before the tech company made it big.

We caught up with Sousa to hear more about the world of dried fruit, the challenges related to shepherding a family business through multiple generations and what obstacles they’re working to overcome in the years ahead.

Q: How has the company changed over the years?

A: We were in Cupertino until 1982, then we moved to San Jose until 2000 or 2001 and then to Vacaville. Any company that has been around that long grows a lot. Probably the biggest changes are how and where we buy fruit.

Around 1986, we sold the farmland and made a commitment to develop the marketing side of the business. It’s put us in the position we’re in today with a much wider variety of fruits and given us a full line of products to sell.

Q: This is a multi-generation family business, of course. How has that impacted your family?  Has it brought you together, created challenges?

A: The statistics are only 4% of businesses make it to the fourth generation. When you own a business, what that usually means is that your kids get a better education than you had — they are exposed to things you weren’t exposed to — and that usually leads them to try new things. As we grow, we will naturally have fewer family members based on the size of the business.

Q: This business got its start as a Silicon Valley orchard. How did that location affect things?

A: When I was a kid, we were on I-280 and Saratoga Sunnyvale Road. Then this company came along that made this technology we all use all day long called Apple. They were not far down the street. They said “Hey, we want to buy one of your orchards,” and offered us part of the stock in the company, but at that point it was worthless. We decided not to sell it. If we had, we would have been on the ground floor of Apple stock, and I’d be doing something vastly different right now. Eventually they ended up building right there — there’s a road called Mariani Avenue that one of the Apple buildings is on.

When the first high tech bubble burst, everything got so crazy. We just couldn’t stay there anymore. My great-grandfather said that Silicon Valley is great for growing babies and trees, and the babies will always win. The Silicon Valley climate and soil are fantastic to grow anything. Once you move towards the valley, it’s more like the desert.

Q: Where do you source your fruit from today?

A: All over the place. We still buy some in California, from Sacramento to Redding and down to Merced and Bakersfield. We probably buy fruit from 20 different countries and regions like South America, Turkey, South Africa, Mexico and several countries in Asia, and our cranberries are in Wisconsin.

Our biggest product is now cranberries. We have a facility in Wisconsin, and we’re completely vertically integrated there. After that would be raisins, prunes, mangoes, then apricots. We also do a huge amount of business with cereal companies, especially Kellogg’s.

Q: You provide the raisins that are in Raisin Bran, right?

A: We probably do 60-plus percent of all their raisins. We have had an exclusive relationship with them since 1987. (Kellogg was) very confident in our ability to deliver; that is what got us in the door. We continue to bring innovative ideas to them about how to do things differently. … We’re proud of that, but we’ve earned that through a lot of hard work.

There’s a saying that a sale doesn’t start until the buyer tells you no, and a relationship doesn’t start until they see how you deal when there’s a problem. Going back and arguing over who’s right and who’s wrong — we just don’t do that. We make it right. If I give you my word, I’m going to do it. And if the circumstances change, and it’s no longer to my benefit, I already gave you my word, and I’m still going to do it. Family businesses exist over time because there’s trust. That’s how you create trust.

Q: Tell me a little bit more about the the world of dried fruit. What goes into preparing and packaging it, and what are some things people might not know?

A: A lot of people don’t understand the level of food safety, effort, controls, compliance and regulations that allow you to store fruit, process it and then have a shelf life that you need for consumers. There’s many steps involved in getting something that’s very dirty coming in from the field to something that’s a sanitary, healthy, processed fruit because you’re always adding moisture back. We call it ready-pack fruit. In the 1950s, we were the first company that had a process to take dried fruit and add moisture to it without it spoiling.

If you put low moisture and high moisture items together, the moisture equilibrates, so the soft thing becomes harder and the hard, dry one becomes moister and softer. We developed a process to put raisins in a cereal with nuts, granola and all kinds of really crunchy stuff, and the moisture is not allowed to leave the raisin. The standing zipper bag — that’s really the technology that took our brand and allowed us to grow it quickly from there.

Q: What is the biggest challenge your industry is facing right now?

A: Being in California, the big challenge is water. That is really going to change over the next 20 or 25 years. They are estimating that a million acres of farm ground will (be unusable) because there won’t be enough water. When you take a million acres of farmland out, everybody’s cost is going up to buy food.

In California, there’s a whole regulatory, environmental push to be green. There’s a cost to that. Outside the state, the biggest challenge is that it’s a world market and a world supply. You have to become somewhat of a global company, but you’re not the size of these mega global companies either. It forces you to have a lot of strategic thought and established relationships that you build on around the world.

Q: It sounds like a lot of the company’s international expansion has happened during your tenure. Is that accurate?

A: It’s been a big effort in the last 20 years.The reality is no different than everybody else that’s exporting. The population is not growing in this country, so you’ve got two choices: You come out with something new, or you steal share from somebody else. The true growth really is where the population is growing.