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I am Tom Van Wingerden from Van Wingerden Greenhouses in Blaine, Washington.

We run this business with five owners, and we work closely with Ball Seed as a gold supplier.

We've been in the young plant supply with Ball Seed since around 1990.

I wasn't really around to do much those days because I was only three or four years old, but my dad built the business up with Ball as a partner, and they really helped us to get started and built the business for us.

It's been a long journey, and we were one of the lucky few, I'd say.

We approach our growing for our growers like we would for our own business.

Our goals align with our customers' goals in that we want a quality plug, well-rooted, compact top that we can transplant easily.

When it comes to quality, we always try to have somebody's eyes on all of our products at all times.

We have a well-rounded team that is able to share ideas and work together, so that has really helped.

And then really the final challenge to it is really getting it to the customer without product freezing, without product tumbling, things like that.

So we've worked on our packaging, we've worked on the amount of time product is in a box, on a truck, outside of a greenhouse.

Our approach to logistics is always truck delivery first.

If we can deliver it on a truck, preferably our own truck, we will do that.

We also partner with Mainland Floral and West Coast Floral up in Canada to truck deliver throughout Western Canada.

And if all else fails, we move to FedEx or Alaska Air or another airline.

We're working toward 100% order fill with a couple different strategies.

The main one right now is using our finished plants division to support our young plants division, where we can increase our over-sow and consume a lot of that overage with our finished division in something like a color bowl or a mixed basket, and then offer our best trays out of that sowing to our young plants customer.

A lot of the investments we've made in the past year has been on the software side.

We've developed several pieces of software within our system to be able to control the flow of products to the greenhouse, to improve traceability, and to provide data to help us improve efficiency in shipping.

And then we've also invested in employees that can look over that data quickly and efficiently so we can focus on growing plants.

Here at Van Wingerden's, we care about the future and we know that the only way to secure the future is by investing or developing what we have already.

I am Roberto Chavarria and I am the young plant manager for Van Wingerden Greenhouses.

So I would say that the first investment that Van Wingerden is doing is focusing on hiring the right people for the right positions and also training people just so we can pass the knowledge to everybody that is working across the chain.

We have been trying to keep people out of the office and focus the people and the personnel that knows about quality or is involved on the whole project to be out there in the greenhouse.

I value in Ball what I value in our own business is that it's a family business and we treat it so.

They treat us like we're family and we treat them like they're our family.

So that trickles down to our customers, both Ball's customers and our customers, and it reflects on how much we care for each other as well.

It really feels like a true business partnership.