Picking a peck of peppers can be a tongue-twister when you have hundreds to choose from, but there’s a market for every taste.
Cross Country Nurseries in Stockton, New Jersey, feeds the need with a successful shipping model.
Tom Spies, who with his wife, Kristin, purchased the 30-year-old Stockton business from Janie Lamson and Fernando Villegas in 2021, has taken it to the next level with his background in mechanical engineering and logistics.
“There’s not a lot like us around,” he said.
One unique part of the business — besides the sheer number of varieties — is that the nursery starts everything from seed and ships established plants in 3-inch pots, not plugs.
Tom Spies said he prefers attending one-off local festivals to weekly farmers markets.
Cross Country Nurseries offers around 800 varieties of live pepper, tomato, eggplant and herb plants, as well as 120 perennials, delivered to customers’ doors across the country.
Hence the business name.
The nursery also ships fresh peppers in the fall and offers dried pepper powders and seeds.
Spies added the pepper powders and reintroduced perennials to the business. The original owners started with perennials and transitioned to peppers.
The powders have been a hit.
“We use the same peppers that we ship fresh, extra that we have left over,” Spies said. “We dry them in a big dehydrator I got in a laboratory auction, made for keeping cell cultures at body temperature. I had custom racks made, and we dry them all in there. It holds a couple of hundred pounds of peppers at a time.”
The peppers are dried for about a week at low temperature to preserve color, then run through a commercial herb grinder.
Caution is required.
A full greenhouse of plants are ready to ship.
“Especially for the super hots. They’re pretty intense, so you have to wear a Tyvek suit, full-face respirator,” Spies said. “It’s not everyone’s favorite day, but we save a bunch of dried peppers up to try and just knock everything out in one day, all the grinding.”
The popular powders have proved a great way to use extra peppers that had been going to waste at the end of the season, Spies said.
The nursery enjoys a broad and loyal customer base.
“You have the pepper fans who want the hottest and the newest, but we also have a lot of people who want culturally significant peppers, like peppers from their country or they’re trying a new cuisine,” Spies said.
“Maybe they want to make kimchi, so they go for like a good gochugaru, or people like the wiri wiri really tiny pepper. People from Texas like the chiltepin pepper, another really small one. So there’s lots of people just looking for different ways to use different peppers, different colors, you know, hot sauce fans.”
While Cross Country boasts over 500 varieties of peppers, tomatoes are also a big seller. About 200 varieties of the New Jersey staple make up around 20% of sales, Spies said.
Logistics Matter
Maximizing efficiencies means being poised for growth, Spies said, adding that the biggest challenge is keeping things moving when dealing with so many plant varieties.
“Most of the stuff I’ve added so far has been behind the scenes, like process improvements and redesigning the packaging, redesigning the website. Just kind of getting everything smoothed out so it’s ready,” he said. “If we do grow, it would be nice if all the processes can handle it.”
Tom Spies ditched the corporate world for plants and sunshine.
He feels up to the task.
“My first jobs were all manufacturing engineering, so I kind of apply that to the pick, pack and ship process,” he said. “It’s pretty intense and labor intensive, so I just wanted to get that down a lot smoother.”
Spies and his family were Cross Country customers for their own gardening needs when the business came up for sale.
“I was in the corporate world for about 10 years before that,” said the now self-titled chief plant officer. “My studies were mechanical engineering, and then I went into supply chain and procurement. So I’ve been to lots of manufacturing plants and visited lots of suppliers.”
But the corporate world wasn’t for him, so he started looking for businesses for sale during the pandemic.
“I knew it was a unique business,” said Spies, who lives in Annandale about 25 minutes away from the nursery. “No one else was doing this.”
“They were really early into internet sales and shipping products,” he said. “I figured there was a lot of weird stuff I could design and build to help the farm out.”
One improvement was his construction of a germination chamber, which replaced a blanket of heat mats that used to cover the floor of one of 11 greenhouses.
A germination chamber is one innovation Tom Spies brought to Cross Country Nurseries.
“It’s a temperature- and humidity-controlled small room, like 6 by 10 feet, that you can go in there and it holds a bunch of plug trays,” he said. “And once they germinate, you take them out and put them under lights.”
While business has been booming, Spies hasn’t seen much overlap of perennial clientele with customers who buy live pepper and tomato plants.
“We’re still working on building up a customer base for them,” he said. “From year one to year two, it’s about tripled in volume, so I think there’s definitely some potential there.”
Growing the perennial business would help keep on more year-round employees, he said. The business currently employs about 10 full-time, year-round staff. The crew doubles in spring when planting and shipping get into full swing.
