So, where did the name come from? Those of you in the fresh produce business already know about the 24/7/365 nature of the produce business. Despite the best of plans or intentions, the weather, trucks, insects, government agencies, marketing promos, customer demands, and a host of other factors conspire to make life “interesting” for those of us in this line of work. Over the years, we all get the calls at odd hours from worried customers, late truckers, shipping supervisors, receivers, etc. Whenever they came, my understanding wife and I would always look at each other and say: “vegetables never sleep”; and then I’d excuse myself and try to address whatever the issue of the day happened to be. It is this ‘hat-tip’ to customer service and the understanding of the nature of selling perishable items that our company, and this website, is dedicated to.

Regardless the day or month, millions of tireless professionals, from farmers to truckers to sales teams to processors and marketers, provide the finest fresh produce on earth to hundreds of thousands of restaurants, grocery stores, manufacturers, and their hundreds of millions of consumers. Fresh produce is a truly remarkable example of the ‘Law of Supply & Demand’ and is the essence of “just in time supply”. It is textbook Econ 101; perfected and improved since the days of our long ago hunter-gatherer ancestors to today’s industry that is the envy of the world.

It is a pretty cool place to work and to try to make a small impact for the better. Enjoy the site, pick up a few things for the office and give us a call if we can help with your project or your business development needs.

“Tomys Swartwout and his brothers Wybrandt and Herman were the first of the Frisian Swartwolts to write the surname conformable to modern Dutch orthography. They were evidently the first Hollanders to engage in the wholesale business of buying and selling in the Netherlands tobacco cultivated by colonists in Virginia and New Netherland. The facts of their dealing, in 1629 in Amsterdam, in tobacco grown and cured on the island of Manhattan, or three years after the purchase of the island by the Dutch West-India Company from the Indian proprietors, is well established.

It is no less important to mention here that Tomys Swartwout was one of the nineteen courageous representatives of the settlers of New Netherland, who, in convention, in the city-hall, in New Amsterdam, on December 11, 1653, dared to remonstrate against a continuance of the maladministration of the affairs of the province by the arrogant directorate of the West-India Company, and to claim for the taxed colonists a right of voice in the government of it.

The aggressive action of this first landdag of the oppressed inhabitants of New Netherland, although contemptuously ignored and regarded by the despotic guild of avaricious merchants as meriting severe punishment, so that other colonists might be deterred from “deliberating on affairs of state,” had, nevertheless, in the fullness of time, a glorious consummation in the declaration of independence of the thirteen united American colonies.” - passage from the Preface to The Swartwout Chronicles, 1388-1899, by Arthur James Weise, M.A. Trow Directory, Printing & Bookbinding Co. – 1899.

Landdag roughly translates to “country day” and was the name of a ‘council of villages’ in the early days of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, before the British swiped it from them and renamed it New York….