Family Business: Sweet, Sun-Dried Success
Written by Dianne Molvig Thursday, March 24 2011
Snapshot: Mary Mooney
The key ingredients for success at Mooney Farms are sun-dried tomatoes, an old Portuguese recipe, and a family devoted to nurturing their business. Mary Mooney handles the sales and marketing for Bella Sun Luci, the family’s line of sun-dried tomatoes. Her sister, Kelly, is in charge of customer service and order processing, and brother, Steve, oversees production at their 100,000-square-foot Tuscan-style facility in Chico, Calif. Mom, Gretchen, 77, also helps out a bit, in addition to operating her own olive oil ranch nearby.
Over the past 24 years, the family has stuck together to overcome financial hurdles and adapt to shifting consumer demand. Mooney Farms is now the largest producer of sun-dried tomatoes in the United States.
Womenetics: How did your family’s business get its start?
Mary Mooney: We lived on a quarter-horse ranch, a leisure ranch, near Sonoma. We didn’t make money on the horses. They were just hay burners, as my father used to call them. He worked in San Francisco in the shipping industry, where he was exposed to asbestos.
After my father died of cancer at age 56, my mother sold the Sonoma ranch and bought a 30-acre ranch near Gridley, about an hour north of Sacramento. She’d done some research and decided to grow kiwis. Suddenly a bunch of non-farmers became farmers. We planted the kiwi trees, ran the drip lines for irrigation. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life.
Womenetics: Did you stay on the ranch?
Mooney: I went away to college at Chico State to get a marketing degree. I’d moved to San Francisco for a new job and was there about two months when my brother called and said, “You’d better come back. I need you to sell fruit on the roadside.”
The farming crisis of the ’80s had taken hold, and Mom was about to lose the ranch. We weren’t far from the sheriff’s sale. My brother, Steve, an architect and builder, abandoned what he was doing to go back to the ranch to help out. I walked away from my job, my San Francisco apartment, my fancy red sports car, and off to the ranch I went.
Womenetics: Seems like quite a personal sacrifice.
Mooney: It was. But that’s the way our family is and always has been. We are truly family first.
Womenetics: What did you do to turn the ranch around?
Mooney: We sold fruit by the roadside and made $30,000 in 30 days. It was enough to save the ranch. After that, we started going to farmers’ markets, which were just starting at that time.
We realized we needed to sell more than just fresh kiwis. So my Mom, being originally from Minnesota, loved rhubarb. She started making kiwi rhubarb jam, kiwi strawberry, and other flavors. She couldn’t make enough to meet the demand. My brother kept buying her bigger and bigger pots for making jam.
My sister, Kelly, and I were getting up at 3 a.m. to drive three hours to farmers’ markets. I’d also go to restaurants in the Napa Valley, talk to chefs, and whatever variety of kiwi jam they’d ask for, we’d make. The next weekend, we’d go to farmers’ markets and then make deliveries to restaurants on the way home. The first $1 million we made was from our kiwi jam.
Womenetics: But now your specialty is sun-dried tomatoes. How did that come about?
Mooney: We were going to the farmers’ markets, and my marketing sense took over. I thought we needed to sell more products. My father was half-Portuguese. We had an old cookbook of handwritten Portuguese recipes, including one for sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil. My mother decided to make some for us to sell at farmers’ markets.
People went crazy. We were charging $10 a bottle and still couldn’t keep up with the demand. We moved production out of Mom’s kitchen and into an old pizza parlor we rented in downtown Gridley. We were making kiwi jams and sun-dried tomatoes. Soon the demand for sun-dried tomatoes was so great we only had time to go to one or two farmers’ markets. And then we had no time to make kiwi jams.
Womenetics: How has your company grown?
Mooney: I’d heard of a place called Price Club (merged with Costco in 1993) and stopped by without an appointment. I talked to the buyer and asked him to come to the ranch. He did, tried the tomatoes, and gave me a purchase order on the spot. Soon every Price Club in the country wanted our product.
We’re now in almost every major grocery chain in America, usually in the produce department. We also supply food-service companies, and we have 40 private labels. If you eat a sun-dried tomato, it’s probably ours.
We have 48 full-time employees year-round. In 1994, we moved production from the old pizza parlor in Gridley to a 50,000-square-foot facility here in Chico. We were bursting at the seams, so we expanded two years ago to 100,000 square feet. We buy 80 percent of our tomatoes from California growers, and we get most of our olive oil from a family-owned refinery in Portugal.
Womenetics: As a young woman, would you have imagined this is where you’d be?
Mooney: When I was young, I’d never heard of a sun-dried tomato. My mother didn’t feed them to me. Maybe my father ate them along with those pickled pigs feet. But not me.
When I was in college, I had no idea I would be able to run a business. I knew I’d be in sales because I enjoyed people. But I never dreamed I’d get to help run a company and work with my family. It’s such a treat. It really is.
Dianne Molvig is a Madison, Wis.-based freelance writer who writes regularly about business management, financial services, law practice, consumer education, and other topics.
