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News

Interview: Greg Pruett Jr

09/01/2025 - Madeleine Royère-Koonings

Sophie Colvine and Madeleine Royère met with Greg Pruett Jr at Ingomar Packing Company when visiting California in November. He agreed to share his thoughts on the industry, the 2024 season and the future during an interview with us.

Could you please introduce yourself and Ingomar?
My name is Robert Gregory Pruett, but I have gone by Greg all my life, so Greg Pruett Jr. probably gets the point across the best. I've been with Ingomar since 2016 and recently wrapped up my ninth tomato season. I've worked in a few different roles and capacities during my time in the industry. I started off in sales and business development and then got into energy risk management, production planning, packaging procurement, and customer service. Recently, I have started to focus more on the supply chain side of things, while maintaining a few sales accounts.

That’s quite a wide range of experience within the company!
Yes - I've been blessed with my exposure to various pieces of business. The more I learn about one area, the easier it is to understand the next thing. Ingomar, and the industry as a whole, is very interesting to me and I love learning something new every day and every season. I am very hungry to learn more and continue to better myself and add more value to the company, while having fun doing it.

So, is there even any department you haven’t been in?
Finance, they probably try to keep me away!
Now for some more about Ingomar Packing Company. We were founded in 1983 as the first strictly industrial processor of tomatoes in California. We started off with one facility and then added a second facility in 2000. This second facility is where we run all our diced production. Both plants are on the same footprint of land in Los Banos and have been a big part of the global tomato story for a long time now. Our facilities are an important part of the community in Los Banos, in terms of the employment we offer and the work we do with various charities in the area, the chamber of commerce, local parades, and the Los Banos Tomato Festival. We try to be as active as possible in the community.

The next question was about the acquisition of Ingomar's shares, or at least a majority of them by Kagome, what changes did that bring to the business, if any?
Kagome has been a customer for decades and they decided to purchase a minority share of Ingomar back in 2016. We continued to learn more about each other and develop the relationship to the point where they wanted to invest in a more significant way in Ingomar…this led to Kagome’s purchase of majority interest at the start of 2024. Since that additional investment, the biggest impacts have been on really the financial and quality side of things. Now that we are a subsidiary of a publicly traded Japanese company, we have had to change our fiscal year, beef up financial controls, bolster IT systems, among other projects.
The most exciting changes have come from the quality side. While we've always very much prided ourselves on our quality of product and service, the additional Kagome investment has given us the push to raise our game even further. Kagome is a company that's based on trust and quality, so we at Ingomar need to make sure that we're meeting their global expectations and needs. Kagome has been recognized as one of the most trusted brands in Japan, which is a very significant accolade. A lot of that trust is going to come down to the quality of the ingredients that they're getting from their raw material suppliers. Kagome and Ingomar have been exchanging a lot of information regarding quality and learning as much as we can from each other to make sure that we can maintain Kagome’s reputation of trust and quality.

So overall a lot of positive changes?
Yes, a lot of positive changes! With any acquisition like this, there will always be hurdles and wrinkles that you didn't know were there – you just have to continue to iterate and problem solve. Ingomar strives to be the most trusted tomato processor worldwide in terms of the product we're making and the service we provide. While that has been our mission for a long time, I think Kagome's kind of breathed some new life into that. It has certainly been a big change, going from essentially a family-owned, grower owned company to a Japanese subsidiary of a publicly traded company. All four grower owners are still partners and that is a huge factor in terms of our security of our supply chain of tomatoes.

Has the acquisition changed the business, in terms of the quantity that Kagome purchases from Ingomar? Or is that still the same? You still have a contract with them and negotiate?
There has been no change on this front. While it is interesting given that Kagome is an owner as well as a customer, we have a supply contract with Kagome just as we would with any other customer. Our management team has the responsibility to the other owners to make sure that we are acting in Ingomar’s overall best interest. Ultimately, what is best for Ingomar is going to benefit Kagome. Kagome’s ownership has not changed our opinion of any of our other customers. The Ingomar team continues to manage the business and act in accordance with the values that our customers have come to expect.

On the supply side, you said Ingomar is owned by 4 farmer families, how much supply of fresh tomatoes comes from these 4 farmers? Or is it changing?
It varies from year to year. This past season, about 95% of our incoming tomatoes were sourced from our grower-owners. This is a substantial part of our business model and we consider it a competitive advantage.

So talking about the 2024 season, you said it was your 9th season, so how did it go for Ingomar?
It went well and was fairly noneventful. In 2023 there was a hurricane in the second half of the season that luckily did not end up being the disaster that it could have been. 2023 also saw large-scale planting delays that pushed the end of the season to the beginning of November. We had a huge crop in 2023, and everything turned out ok, but there was obviously a lot of risk running so late into the calendar year.
In 2024, Mother Nature and the fruit cooperated reasonably well. There was some extreme heat in June and July that the industry was pretty concerned about, but it wasn't as impactful as we were bracing for. On the Ingomar front, we tweaked our production planning process a little bit this year, which helped us more efficiently hit our customers’ specifications. Consistently meeting specifications is something that we really pride ourselves on and doing so is only getting more important. Customers are getting increasingly more specific as to what they are looking for, whether it be the best paste for producing ketchup, a focus on lycopene content, etc.

How long was the season for you, how many days, do you know?
We started around July 8th or 9th and ended the first week of October – pretty much along the “standard” timeline. 2023 was anything but standard. We didn’t start until the 19th of July in 2023 and ended on Halloween, so that was much different.

And the volume was a bit reduced as well.
Yes, this was intentional and observed across the California industry. We have seen unplanned smaller crops in recent years that were driven by Mother Nature, but the 2024 reduction was an intentional one driven by global supply and demand.

So you said it was quite uneventful this year, were there any challenges for you in terms of market or processing or not specially?
During any tomato season, any given day is going to present challenges. One of the more difficult headwinds that we have faced recently has come from the volatility in raw tomato pricing and inventory buildup. As is well known at this point, the price of tomatoes in California dropped substantially from 2023 to 2024. This resulted in any 2023 inventory across the industry to be relatively high cost when compared to 2024 production. The larger than expected California crop in 2023, coupled with increases around the globe has been a challenge with other parts of the world becoming more competitive ...

So let’s talk about China. What impact has it had?
China has certainly impacted our ability to compete in some export international markets. For Ingomar, and California as a whole, the majority of what we make is sold within the domestic market. However, exports are always going to be an important part of the equation. We know that many export opportunities are going to come and go depending on product pricing around the world and global inventory, a lot of it is fairly opportunistic. China, with their ability to produce and sell tomato paste at such a low cost in countries that will import and use Chinese tomato paste, can make it very difficult at least in this point in time for anybody in California to compete.

So you mentioned that you do more domestic than export, what would be the balance?
I would say it's 75% domestic, 25% export, maybe 80-20, maybe in some years like this, it's even more heavily weighted to the domestic market.

And the export, to which countries is it? Do you export to Europe?
Yes, so we export a lot to Japan, Central and South America, Mexico, Europe, Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, etc. We have exported to the Middle East, North Africa, pretty much everywhere. And a lot of those locations depend on where else they can get it and when and for what price.

But maybe not all countries will take from China? You are lucky in this North American market, that there’s no import from China.
Yes, that would be a different equation.

It’s different for the European processors, they have China coming in, and they can't stop it.
What's your view on the future of the California tomato processing industry?
The future is bright. While this business will always be cyclical, California is still the best place in the world to grow processing tomatoes. We have well-capitalized and experienced growers with large ranches that can be farmed efficiently, soil that allows for efficient cultivation of tomatoes, and we have the scale. California's obviously very heavily involved in agriculture of all kinds and processing tomatoes are a huge part of that. In short, California is very much in it for the long haul. The industry is in good hands.

Do you foresee any major challenges in the next five years, or more long-term?
Climate is always an interesting one, especially in California with our water situation. We often point out that California is always two years away from a drought. While we had a very good winter two years ago and a good winter last year, our water infrastructure, combined with the state’s regulatory environment, often does not result in what we would call an adequate amount of water made available to farmers. That impacts the cost of growing tomatoes and our competitiveness globally, so that's a potential challenge and we obviously can't control whether or not it's going to rain.
We saw what happened with a few years of consecutive drought, just three or four years ago, with supplies getting tight, there was essentially no tomato paste to go around. If you were a buyer looking for a significant volume of tomato paste, it just wasn’t there.
Additionally, we at Ingomar, and California at large, have no control over what other processors or other regions of the world are going to do in terms of responding in a way that we think would be appropriate to various realities in the market in terms of supply and demand. So that's always a variable you're going to have that's out of your control. We know what our inventories are, we know our sales strategy, and we can control how much we pack and what we contract for and business we take on or cut back on. We need to continue to make sure that we're responsible players and just react as best as possible to what is going on globally. There are so many variables in this industry that you can’t control, we just got to focus on what we can control - it’s definitely not an easy industry.

What are Ingomar’s plans for future development, are you planning to expand or add some new type of products?
Good question – we are not planning on expanding or adding new products at this time. It is always something you have to balance: Keeping one eye looking at what you're doing today and making sure you're operating effectively in the present, while keeping your other eye on the future and what trends might be going on, what customers might be interested in, what the market can bear … Right now, just given the context of the global industry and what we are comfortable with at Ingomar right now, there's nothing on the immediate horizon.

You are an industrial processor, do you plan to stay like that?
Currently, our plan is to stay an industrial processor – that is our core competency and what we have focused on since we were founded in 1983. Industrial is what we know. We are great at what we do, but you can always get better and improve.

What could be the next innovations, in terms of technological innovation or in terms of products?
One of the things that is going to need to happen for the future of the California processing industry to stay as bright as I previously indicated is making sure that we remain an efficient and cost-effective producer of tomatoes. If one looks at the tomato yield per acre from 2024 back to 1995, there's been big productivity increases, but not recently. In fact, it has been essentially flat in the past 10-ish years. Input costs for harvesting and growing tomatoes are going to continue to increase, things are going to continue getting more expensive, so the growers need to be making money, they need to be healthy, processors need to be making money, and our customers need to be making money, so really for the first part of the supply chain, the growers need to be as efficient and effective as possible.
A lot of those yield gains came from the introduction of drip irrigation but now that the juice has been squeezed there, 99% of people are using drip irrigation, so the industry needs to figure out other ways of getting more productive. Luckily, there's a lot of interesting things happening on the varietal development side, gene editing, things like that. Everybody's favorite buzzword these days is artificial intelligence and what can be done there and there's a lot to be said for applications of AI in farming practices as well as factory operations, looking at, for example, talking about color sorters and looking at other ways to keep foreign material out of your product or to keep your plants running as efficiently as possible, so those things and then other ways to keep labor as efficient and productive as possible at the field level, automatic transplanting, the introduction of more robotics… I think the answers I just gave could probably be applied to a lot of agricultural or manufacturing industries but the “easy gain” that drip irrigation provided, we've got to find something else because the productivity per acre for the California tomato processing industry, we've got to find a way to continue to increase that, because costs are going to continue to increase.

And in the factory, do you see any innovation? Since aseptic was the last big innovation, there's since been just a few improvements, more energy efficiency, but there doesn’t seem to be anything really new?
There’s a lot of different technologies that may be more energy efficient. The industry around the globe still uses a lot of fossil fuels, obviously, to boil the water to create the steam to evaporate the water out of the tomatoes, so there's nothing major on that front that I'm personally aware of. I am not as operations focused as some, and I don't want to insult anybody who's working on these things, but from my perspective, when I hear that question, I'm focused mostly on what we can do in the field. Because the more efficient growers are, the better they can do, and for the long-term viability of the industry, every player in the chain has to be healthy.

Last question on sustainability: what actions have you taken, or what are you implementing in this field?
The crown jewel of our sustainability program is our artificial marsh. We use our artificial marsh to treat and ultimatley reuse a lot of the water that we use during our production process. The artificial marsh, which is a system of interlocking ponds, is filled with specific types of aquatic vegetation that break down the biological material (tomato sediment) found in our rinsewater. For example, from 2013 to 2021, we recycled on average 56 million gallons of water each tomato season. Last year we did 116 million gallons! We make adjustments to the system every year in an effort to make it more efficient. Additionally, the marsh supports a host of wildlife plants, animals and there's a large waterfowl population.
Another benefit of the artificial marsh is that by treating the water in the way that we are, through this natural process, we are avoiding the emissions that would have been incurred had we gone through the municipal standard treatment system. Not only are we saving water, but we are also avoiding creating a significant amount of emissions, through our natural process. We have someone on staff whose full-time job essentially is to take care of the marsh, and we developed it over the last 10 plus years. It's something that we're all very proud of and it's more than just a nice talking point, it's something that actually is material to what we do.

Is there anything else that you would like to tell us all, that you think is important for our readers?
I think the tomato industry is an awesome place to work. It's a huge global industry, but it's a small world on the other hand. I've worked in the industry for nearly 10 years now, so I have grown to know so many familiar faces and names and people that you get to work with and see every few years and exchange information. I was a political science major, so I love learning about different parts of the world and big markets and how things interact and there's always layers to everything and especially in the processed tomato world, there's just so many variables and again the biggest variable is Mother Nature and no one controls that so it's always a wild card.

Additional information:
- Ingomar Packing Company Youtube Video
- Artificial Marsh Video

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