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If you have had a DiGiorno Supreme Pizza or some Safeway salsa with your tortilla chips, you might want to pause and thank GC Farms for supplying the peppers that give both items their zing. DiGiorno and Safeway are just two of many companies that rely on the farm for their cornucopia of produce and their talent for flash-frozen processing.
“I do get excited when I see what they make from what we produce,” said Chief Operating Officer Tim Chiala. “But the true judges are my kids, and it’s even cooler when they have pride in it. My daughter brags about the pizza at school, saying, ‘That’s our stuff.’”
Named after family patriarch George Chiala, the GC Farms story starts with George’s father, immigrant Vito Chiala, who began farming the Santa Clara Valley in 1942. Thirty years later, George and his wife, Alice Chiala, started their own farm operation in Morgan Hill and quickly noticed that consumer buying patterns were changing.
Shoppers were becoming more concerned with the aesthetics of produce, wanting more uniform color, shape and size and minimal blemishes. Tim, George’s son, said that as the amount of rejected fruits and vegetables, called “off-grades,” increased, it left the Chiala’s with the problem of marketing them.
The answer, Tim said, was IQF: individually quick-frozen foods.
“My dad had experience with the frozen food world,” George’s son Tim said. “He had experience with a frozen foods plant and started processing the off-grades. As consumers became more picky, our supply became more bountiful.”
What had become a way to find a home for unwanted produce has now become how 100% of the crops that GC Farms grows or buys is processed.
“We saw his opportunity to take all the stuff that people didn’t know what to do with,” he said, “and make it a culinary ingredient for large food manufacturers. We are just a big spice rack for companies like Nestlé, Conagra and Campbell’s soups.”
As the processing facilities in Morgan Hill that served their Nature Quality and George Chiala Farms began to age, the company decided to make the move to Hollister in 2015, building the current 92,000-square-foot processing facility on Fairview Road.
“We were looking at remodeling,” Chiala said. “But it was so expensive to bring those old facilities to new standards that we decided to build something new. And we wanted to get out of Santa Clara County because they were difficult to work with.”
There were other advantages as well. According to Chiala, many of the growers they dealt with were transitioning from Morgan Hill and Gilroy to San Benito County. The new facility was located close to the freeway, and, as a bonus, it had access to a fiber optic network, which allowed it to connect to the facilities in Morgan Hill.
It also allowed them to add 800 acres of farmland to their 300 acres in Morgan Hill and 150 acres in Gilroy which they use as research and development for their growers.
“We try everything on this farm first,” Chiala said, “like different seed varieties, different spacing, different ways to machine harvest. But we only grow about 15% of what we process. The rest comes mostly from growers in San Benito County.”
In addition to DiGiorno and Safeway Selects, their vegetables can be found in Costco pizzas, Bagel Bites, assorted TraderJoe’s, Target and Albertsons brands, and Rotel salsa, among other products. They supply Conagra Brands, which owns Healthy Choice, Bird’s Eye and Hunt’s.
Their main products are bell peppers, poblanos, habaneros and garlic, with tomatillos, onions, mushrooms, celery and carrots not far behind. They also grow leafy greens like spinach, kale and chard.
The main feature of the Hollister facility is the machinery that blast freezes or individually quick freezes vegetables to preserve quality and color.
“We take the raw product, wash it, and then reduce the size,” Chiala said. We dice it, roast it, or peel it, and then steam it to kill bacteria. Then, it goes on conveyor belts into tunnels, where we blow negative 30-degree air on it. It goes to a solid without going through crystalization.”
All the vegetables that pass through the facility are picked at their peak and processed within 24 hours. In addition to freezing, the facility can also dehydrate, brine, pasteurize, saute, fire roast, oil roast, oven roast and oil infuse the produce. The final products can be purees, dices, strips, slices, rings, whole and halves.
“We sometimes have an advantage over what you get in the grocery store,” Chiala said. “That has to be picked immature so it can sit on a shelf and look pretty for a while. Here, we pick it and—boom!—we stick it in a freezer.”
The farm processes over 150 million pounds of raw vegetables annually, resulting in 120 million pounds of finished product. The facility has its own water treatment plant, and the company is looking into a system that would turn its organic waste into methane and run generators to create electricity.
“We bring in 800,000 pounds of whatever we are running three times a week,” he said, “We’ll be receiving 20 truckloads a day of different fruits and vegetables. We shut down at Christmas for maintenance, then open up again in February.”
Chiala said that one thing he likes about the business is that it is still family-run and can support many small family-owned farms in San Benito County, with some selling their entire yield to GC Farms.
“We have a lot of water, and the soil is good,” he said. “But the knowledge being passed down and passed down and passed down is invaluable. Keeping farming in San Benito County is super important. Once you lose those skill sets, it’s really hard to learn it from a book.”
BenitoLink thanks our underwriters, Hollister Super and Windmill Market, for helping to expand the Eat, Drink, Savor series and give our readers the stories that interest them. Hollister Super (two stores in Hollister) and Windmill Market (in San Juan Bautista) support reporting on the inspired and creative people behind the many delicious food and drink products made in San Benito County. All editorial decisions are made by BenitoLink.
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