Comstock's magazine 0118 - January 2018 | Página 34

n TASTE
FEEDING THE FAMILY LEGACY
General Produce has been meeting demands throughout the region for generations
BY Zack Quaintance PHOTOS: Joan Cusick
F
General Produce, currently run by cous-
ins Tom and Dan Chan, has been a fam-
ily business for three generations and
over eight decades
34
comstocksmag.com | January 201 8
rom its headquarters in Sacramento
about a mile north of the State Cap-
itol, a fleet of General Produce white
refrigerated trucks leaves each day for
roughly 600 produce deliveries to recipi-
ents throughout Northern California and
beyond, going as far as southern Oregon
and western Nevada.
They deliver a wide range of fruits
and vegetables to school districts, com-
missaries, grocery stores, hotels and
restaurants. As they do, their progress is
tracked by color-coded bars on a screen
hung high on a wall back at home base,
above dozens of men and women who
manage the business from its office on
the edge of downtown. General Produce
is one of the largest and most prominent
food distributors in the region, with a list
of customers in Northern California that
includes the Elk Grove Unified School
District, Payless Markets, Sutter Health,
the Ord Community Commissary at Fort
Hunter Liggett, and Dos Coyotes Border
Cafe, among many others.
While food distribution has evolved
to keep pace with trends and regulations
that have shaped the U.S. food indus-
try in recent years, General Produce has
grown and modernized as well. However,
it has also remained a family business for
more than eight decades and three gen-
erations. In recent years, the emergence
of farm-to-fork preferences has in some
ways sent the company back to its roots,
leading it to once again work with small
local farms. But even with a growing em-
phasis on the locally-grown, consumer
demand for year-round produce re-
mains strong — making companies like