Our History
Coke Farm is dedicated to providing delicious, healthy, organic produce not only as a service to its customers, but also for the betterment of the environment and the health of its hard-working employees.
Coke Farm is dedicated to providing delicious, healthy, organic produce not only as a service to its customers, but also for the betterment of the environment and the health of its hard-working employees.
It all started with a quarter-acre of strawberries founder Dale Coke planted on his property in Watsonville, California in 1980. Interested in organic farming for its environmental and social impacts, he was an instrumental member in California Certified Organic Farmers’ early days.
By 1981, Coke Farm became one of the first CCOF’s certified farms in the Central California chapter, fueling a movement that created a higher standard for organic farming for others to follow.
Dale Coke is a fifth generation Californian with a farming family background. He cultivated a wide network of like-minded peers and customers through the California region and nationally together with his sister Madelene, establishing the reputation of Coke Farm as a source for specialty crops and innovative products.
Dale met Christine Cattin, a Swiss architect, in 1988, and they married in 1991. She joined the company a few years later and was instrumental in developing partnerships with both key growers and customers.
As consumer demand for organic and specialty produce grew, business flourished. In 2007 Olivier Griss, Christine’s son, joined the sales team to help with an emerging need for local family farms to find access to national markets and to get help with post harvest handling and other grower services. The need to provide market access for organic farms in the region became increasingly apparent and became the driving mission for the Coke Farm team.
Today Coke Farm is a thriving food hub, providing knowledgable representation in the market place and equitable and sustainable services to our 70+ grower partners so their farms will be able to thrive into the future. We strongly believe that this emerging next generation of new growers is vital to our food system. We provide crop planning, post harvest handling, sales, packaging and compliance services at our state of art cooler in San Juan Bautista, California.
Underscoring its legacy of work in organic farming, Whole Foods named Coke Farms a 2018 Supplier of the Year for “commitment to organic farming, pioneering the organic produce industry and representing a diverse group of local fruit and vegetable growers,” noted in the retailer’s announcement.
Dale and Christine were also the recipient of the 2009 Eco-Farm Conference Sustie Award, which honors those who have been actively and critically involved in ecologically-sustainable agriculture and have demonstrated their long term, significant contributions to the well-being of agriculture and the planet.”
