Business in Vancouver's "How I Did It" feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, John Newell, co-founder and COO of Windset Farms talks about how he and his brother, Steve Newell, CEO, built their greenhouse business into the largest grower-marketer in B.C., and how they won a World's Best Tomato Grower award in Berlin last month.
"This is the first year that this group [HortiBiz] presented this award to a grower. It's not the best tomato – it's based on grower marketing and sales and overall business. We are one of the largest marketers of greenhouse products in North America, and we're the biggest grower-marketer in B.C.
"We grew up on a chicken farm that my mom and dad started in 1980 in Mount Lehman, Abbotsford. After university, we went directly into farming. We wanted to look at a business that was knowledge-based. We knew that the greenhouse business was on the leading edge of agriculture, so it had the technology side that we liked. My brother is the CEO; I'm the chief operating officer. I do all the marketing, sales and operations; he does new business.
"We started the business with four acres of bell peppers. Two years later we started in tomatoes in Delta. At that time, we were new shareholders of BC Hothouse. They did all the marketing for all the shareholders.
"Maybe five or six years after getting into the business, we knew that we needed to steer our own ship and market and sell our own products. We realized this business is growing so fast, you've got to be very innovative and be willing to take some risks, and they weren't doing that at BC Hothouse at all.
"When we left BC Hothouse and formed our own marketing company in January 2003, we started to think about branding differently. We realized that Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco – which were our three main markets when we started – is a more sophisticated market. So we came up with this art-music theme that would fit the identity of our core consumer. We call most of our products [things like] Maestro bell peppers and Virtuoso beefsteak tomatoes. It created a distinction for our brand.
"We don't just grow beefsteak tomatoes and vine tomatoes. We grow cocktail-size tomatoes, Roma tomatoes on the vine, grape tomatoes, orange, yellow tomatoes. So we have a lot of different items creating a buzz, making it interesting to buyers and customers.
"In the last five years, we've taken it to a different level where we not only have product diversity, we have geographical diversity in the fact that we have Mexican partner growers, British Columbia partner growers, and we've got our own farms in California and Nevada where we are producing year-round. Our greenhouse in California is one of the biggest, and it's the most high-tech greenhouse in the world.
"If you have a crop failure, we've got the backup of two or three other locations doing that same item. We also have an import program where we bring product in from other parts of the world to fill in gaps or to offer something different. They're under our brand."
