Some companies talk about long-term thinking. Mariani Packing Company lives it.
George Sousa Jr., President at Mariani Packing Company
Founded in 1906, the California-based dried fruit and cranberry producer is now 120 years old and operating across five generations of family ownership. George Sousa Jr. runs a business that once turned down Apple Computer stock in exchange for an apricot orchard in Cupertino, a business where grower relationships trace back to Croatian immigrant families who settled in the Santa Clara Valley decades ago. A business where a great-great-grandfather’s standard, “my word is my bond,” still functions as operating policy today.
That kind of institutional continuity is rare anywhere. In food manufacturing, where consolidation is accelerating and private equity is reshaping the farming landscape, it’s almost singular. We sat down with George to talk about how Mariani governs five generations of family ownership, what vertical integration actually looks like in practice, why probiotic prunes are the company’s biggest success story, and what he sees coming in the next chapter.
Q. You have multiple fourth-generation family members working in the business. How does your family approach leading the company together?
George Sousa Jr.: I’ll give you some breaking news. We just started with our first fifth-generation family member, so it’s now five generations in the business. And it’s my daughter, so it’s pretty cool.
It’s evolved over time. I tell people: think about your own family, go back three or four generations. Everyone probably lived in the same house, the same neighborhood. And then that expands, people have different interests, they do different things. How it was run at the beginning was pretty much everyone worked at the company. That’s just what you did.
As you go through the generations, managing an increasing number of non-working owners of the business becomes a little more like running a non-family business. We have both active and not-active people in the fourth generation. All of them are on our family board of directors. We get together anywhere from monthly to quarterly. They’re all involved in employee culture events, which is really valuable both to them and to the employees.
You have to start creating more structure. Where families get in trouble is no different from sitting at the dinner table and hesitating to bring something up. A molehill turns into a mountain. We’ve had a lot of good family discussions over the last two years about putting everything on the table. No elephants in the room. Everyone has a responsibility to be informed about what’s happening at the business. It’s a template to ensure the business stays successful into future generations.
Q. What does that structure look like in practice?
GSJ: That is the art of this science. When we started getting all the fourth-generation family members together, some were working full-time at the business, some had other businesses but were still hands-on owners. We’d never had to navigate that in the first three generations. Everyone had worked there.
So we committed to having tough conversations once a week for close to six months. We told everyone: when you walk in this room, it’s just your names, not your titles. That’s why we call it the family board.
We have a very official board of directors and stockholders with a couple of formal meetings a year covering the things everyone needs to be aware of. But for family members who want to be more directly involved, the family board meets more often. We get quarterly updates from our executive leadership team and go deeper into the business. Once family members turn 18, they’re invited to attend, mostly by Zoom. At stockholder meetings, everyone has a voice. At family board meetings, the ground rule is that you’re there to listen, not necessarily to participate, because we have an agenda to get through.
When owners aren’t kept informed about the things that impact them, that’s where things go south. We’re very sensitive to that.
Q. The food industry is seeing historic consolidation and M&A activity right now. You’re still family-owned, independent, and growing. What does that allow you to do that larger corporate structures can’t?
GSJ: It’s different. Amazon can lose massive amounts of money for 15 or 20 years because they have investors funding the business. We don’t. We have the resources the family has and our banking relationship. That’s their advantage; they can fund things without needing to pay people back on a short-term basis.
On the flip side, we call it corporate farming. On both the processing and farming sides, it’s becoming very corporate. Our approach is, how do we compete in that world? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Small family farms and small businesses, it’s just too hard to compete. So our strategy is to be completely vertically integrated on our main commodities and handle anywhere from 25 to 60% of our own product.
That’s not because we don’t value our growers. There are just fewer of them. And they have different marching orders now because they’re run by funds, insurance companies, or private equity. They’re in the game to turn real estate. We’re in it for the long run.
What we rely on, on the processing and selling side, is what this company has been built on since 1906: trust. Trust through the entire supply chain, starting with our growers, running through our employees, and out to our customers. We have large customers on strategic, longer-term relationships because of our vertical integration strategy. Food safety, food quality, risk of recall, all of those things are becoming bigger hits to companies when they go wrong. When you control the supply chain and you’re dealing with the same people for decades, not just five years, it creates a food safety safety net.
My dad did a company video and talked about his grandfather, who gave an example of something that happened in the 1920s or 1930s. His comment was, “My word is my bond. I don’t need a contract.” That was 90 years ago, and it is still very prevalent in how we do things. When we make a commitment, whether it works out to our advantage or not, we stick with it. Customers, growers, employees, they build a respect for that.
Q. You acquired Urban Processing in 2011. What has that integration made possible over the past 15 years?
GSJ: We’ve dramatically grown the cranberry business itself, which is what Urban was doing. Now we’re fully vertically integrated there. We grow cranberries, store them in our own freezer facilities before processing, and handle the trucking ourselves. Every step from field to customer is integrated.
The other thing is that we bought it partly for strategic location. Because the facility is in Wisconsin, a big chunk of grocery chains, club stores, and companies like Walmart are east of the Mississippi. Having the ability to package and distribute from the Midwest minimizes logistics costs and keeps us competitive. Before we bought Urban, we had actually become their biggest customer. They were processing cranberries and we were bringing them all the way to California, packaging them, then shipping them back across the country. The acquisition changed all of that.
Q. Has vertical integration helped you navigate the economic volatility and tariff pressure of the past year or two?
GSJ: Yes. California is a high-cost state to do business in. Having product and facilities in the Midwest greatly improves the economics compared to where we were before the acquisition. Freight costs, storage, logistics: the Wisconsin facility helps on all of those fronts. And having our own warehousing there gives us additional flexibility in how we use it.
Q. Food as medicine is a growing conversation in the industry, and probiotic prunes are one of your best sellers. Where is your functional food strategy going from here?
GSJ: That’s probably what I’m most excited about. A lot of our products are genuinely healthy, clean-label products. As we develop new items, the strategy is that they will either be functional, clean-label, or both.
Probiotic prunes are the biggest success story we’ve ever had. The thinking behind it goes back to when my kids were in high school. I noticed they weren’t drinking the sodas in the house. Their friends weren’t either. They were choosing to eat healthier, and that was becoming a real trend.
It got me motivated because if I gave you a list of all the attributes in a prune without telling you what the product was, 10 out of 10 people would say they want to eat it. But then you say the name.
What’s really changed is the focus on gut health. People are starting to understand that gut health isn’t just a concern when something goes wrong. The science around how your gut connects to your brain, bone health, cognitive function, people are much more tuned into that now. And I think there’s a growing recognition that taking pills to supplement for a lifestyle you’re not changing doesn’t lead to long-term health.
Our products are portable, they store well, they fit active lifestyles. My kids are in their early 30s now, and their friends are saying, “I actually really like prunes.” That tells me something. We’re positioned well with the direction we’re heading, and for the items that have added sugar, we’re continuously working to reduce that.
Q. Your family has been farming in California for 120 years. How have you adapted to changing growing conditions and the globalization of sourcing?
GSJ: Farming is interesting. Quick story: we actually started in Cupertino. Some guys who were building computers in their garage came to us and wanted to buy one of our apricot orchards to build their office. We’d never heard of them. They offered us stock, and we said, you don’t really have anything, so we’ll just take the cash for the orchard. Apple Computer’s first office building is on one of our apricot orchards in Cupertino.
Silicon Valley was, and is, a perfect fruit-growing area. Close enough to the ocean that it cools down at night, moderate temperatures, ideal soil. From there it moved to the Central Valley. And over time, there’s been the growth of internationally sourced food. If you look at latitude and longitude, what grows in California can often grow wherever those coordinates line up elsewhere on the map. The difference is food safety standards are much higher here than in most of the world.
So it’s a blend. We buy domestically where we can. Cranberries from Wisconsin, prunes, raisins, and apricots still from California. We supplement with international purchases, and we have a sourcing team that handles both domestic grower sourcing and international supply. From the California industry side, the trend is that farming continues to move further into the valley, toward Nevada and Arizona, where the weather is more extreme than the old Santa Clara Valley conditions.
Q. Tell me about your relationships with growers and how those have evolved.
GSJ: A lot of those relationships go back to when my dad was building the grower base in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Some of those farmers are still with us today, now in their third and fourth generations. You end up with an almost family-like relationship with your longer-term growers.
Even though the name Mariani sounds very Italian, it’s actually Croatian. Both sides of my family are from Croatia. What happened is that when Croatian immigrants came to the United States and they were farmers, many of them settled in the Santa Clara Valley. So there was an ethnic connection alongside the business connection that spanned decades.
That isn’t so much the case anymore. New relationships develop, and it really comes back to what I said earlier: you do what you say you’re going to do. If people feel heard, respected, and appreciated, those become long-term relationships. The grower relationships are honestly the most important ones we have, because without the fruit sourced in the first place, nothing else matters.
Q. You have employees who have been with you for 40+ years and worked their way up. What’s behind that kind of tenure?
GSJ: It’s interesting. We were in Cupertino for a long time, then moved our plant to Santa Cruz, eight miles away. Everyone stayed. But if you go back to Cupertino, when I first came to work, we had about 170 employees and around 150 of them came from five families. Not my family alone, but people who worked for us, their cousins, sons and daughters, nephews and nieces.
Then we moved to Vacaville, about 80 to 90 miles away, in 2000 and 2001. A lot of people couldn’t make that move. So you almost had to start over with the core of the workforce. We’ve essentially built that culture twice in our history. And so we have people who have been with us since the day we arrived in Vacaville.
Our culture is the priority. At the end of the day, my first responsibility is making sure we have a family-type culture. Every family has accountability, right? Kids don’t always make their beds. But if you do accountability the right way, if you explain here’s what we’re doing and here’s why and here’s what I need from you, people don’t mind it.
The other thing I ask of everybody is, if you’re in the office, walk out into the plant at least once a day. People really appreciate that. You can feel when people feel appreciated, and you can feel when they don’t. For us, sustaining that over a long period of time means taking a longer-term view, and that means staying focused on building the culture. Our values have been the same for 120-something years. When people see that you walk the talk, you earn trust, and then that family connection grows from there.
Q. You’re celebrating 120 years and just entering the fifth generation. What does the next chapter for Mariani look like?
GSJ: We’re always watching what’s happening on the consumer side. I think what we’re doing strategically, in terms of how we’re developing new items and where we’re focusing, puts us in a good spot.
People have to eat. As the world develops, especially in developing countries where there’s a lot of interest in our products, there’s a connection to portable, shelf-stable, healthy foods. A lot of those markets are also more accustomed to healthy eating and living off the land than consumers here. So I think there’s a real connection there.
From a food safety standpoint, what used to be a missed bag or a call to the company for a replacement has accelerated to potential liability. And so large customers are being very diligent about approving their supplier base. We’ve focused and positioned the business to always be on that list. It gets more expensive to make that list, but the benefit is that customers who trust you, who feel confident in your food safety and surety of supply, are comfortable being fair with you. And I’m finding that they increasingly recognize that if their preferred suppliers can’t afford to do what’s being asked of them, they won’t have the safety of supply they need.
So it’s becoming a little more collaborative. You’ve got to keep bringing value and innovation. That’s something we’ve done for decades. It’s built a reputation, and we have to stay focused on it.
