The New Abnormal

Fall colors — California style— are here now. The Poison oak leaves in the brush in the canyon below our packing shed have turned from glossy green to a dull rose. And in the fields, the peppers are lighting up the rows with brilliant yellows, oranges and reds. Normally we would be asking ourselves at this time of the year just how much longer we can hope to pick nice, ripe tomatoes. We’re now picking the first fruit from the last of three consecutive tomato plantings we got into the ground in the spring. If all goes well, we should have a nice crop to harvest throughout October. But, of course, nothing is normal anymore. Where stable weather was once our primary concern at this time of year we now find ourselves fretting about supply chain dynamics.

We got our first uneasy introduction to the new abnormal in the early summer when some of our longtime customers who buy thousands of pounds of dry-farmed Early Girls tomatoes, like PizzaHacker in San Francisco or Happy Girl Kitchen on the Monterey Peninsula had to postpone or cancel some orders because they couldn’t source the jars that they needed for the sauce that they wanted to make. We worked our way through those issues, but now we’re confronting a cardboard crisis. Repeatedly, over the last month or so, Sambrailo, our local packaging supplier has run out of the boxes we need for cherry tomatoes or single layer tomatoes. Imagine a box company with several blocks of empty warehouses and fleets of idle forklifts while meanwhile all the farmers are screaming for cartons. But what can they do? The supply chain is kinked. Everybody is talking. Some folks say it was the ship that ran aground in Suez and blocked the canal that set the problem in motion. Other people say it’s because the paper industry is stymied by lack of workers. Who knows?

The restaurants that we sell to have a different perspective on the cardboard problem. China has dramatically reduced the amount of recycled cardboard that they’re importing, so the price of used, unwaxed cardboard has fallen to less than $20/ton, so the crews of scavengers that used to pick up the used cardboard boxes from behind the restaurants have disappeared. As the cardboard piles up, so do the charges coming from the waste disposal companies. One chef I spoke to last week was upset because he has to put the cardboard out at night so that it can be picked up by the garbage trucks, but people ( he was balming Uber drivers) keep tossing sacks of fast food wrappers and garbage in his cans, so he gets fined for contaminated recycle. He is happy- I’d say even “delighted”- to save nice, strong, clean used tomato boxes for us to reuse. And re-use is going to be our strategy for the last phase of this year’s tomato crop.

Several restaurants, including Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and Zuni Cafe, Perbacco, and Flour and Water in San Francisco, make a practice of saving nice boxes for us. And both PizzaHacker and Happy Girl Kitchen have been good about returning the tomato cartons, so I think we’re good for getting our tomatoes boxed up, at least until the next cargo of cardboard arrives at the box company. So how much longer will we have tomatoes? Hopefully, all month, but once we’re into Fall the harvest depends on the weather…..and on the vagaries of the mysterious supply chain. How are you doing on jars? If you’ve got the glass and you’ve got the time and if you’ll have the appetite for lovely red sauces this coming winter NOW is the time to get your tomatoes. And a big thanks to all of you who have gotten tomatoes from us this season, and a big thanks to all of you who have made the effort to return us the clean boxes that they came in.