Name: How The US' Biggest Garlic Producer Survived The Fall Of American Garlic | Big Business
Uploaded: 2025-03-28T23:37:37.000Z
Duration: 21 min 51 s
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Christopher Ranch processes about 12 billion cloves of garlic a year, making it the biggest producer in the United States.

Workers clean, peel, and pack all of it at this massive warehouse in Gilroy, California.

Advanced passive voice

As you can see, there's not a vampire to be seen.

Garlic ripens once a year, and rots fast, so workers have just a few weeks to dig it all up.

When it comes to garlic, we have one shop, and that's all going to be done by hand.

The company is one of the last U.S. garlic producers.

Most shut down when cheaper Chinese garlic began flooding the market in the 1990s.

So how has Christopher Ranch survived the influx of imported, cheap garlic?

And how did it help turn what was once considered a niche ingredient into one of the most popular vegetables in the U.S.?

Christopher Ranch produces more than half of all garlic grown in the United States.

Here, its crops span an area about half the size of Manhattan.

In other words, one billion bulbs of garlic.

That's Ken Christopher, grandson of the original Christopher, who gave the ranch its name in 1956, when he first started growing garlic on just 10 acres.

It's essentially a clone of itself year after year.

You're going to be guaranteed to have the same flavor profile throughout the decades.

And so today, we can enjoy the same Italian, bold, zesty flavor that my grandfather first selected 60 years ago.

Bulbs grow underground over the span of nine months.

Once they're ready, farmers have about a month to dig everything up by hand.

Machines would rip the garlic's thin layers of skin, making it harder to sell and quicker to rot.

The hand selection process remains the best.

So the company hires an extra 3,000 workers for just those few months.

American farmers often struggle to recruit people for this work, so the ranch hires workers from Mexico on temporary agricultural visas.

One problem you're going to find with a lot of farmers in this area is labor.

How can we possibly get enough people to produce the food that Americans eat?

And it takes hundreds more hands at giant warehouses like these to get produce like garlic store-ready.

It's critical to get it into one of these rooms as fast as we can.

Each one of our 100 million pounds, wherever they're grown in California, all come home to here.

Workers wheel it all in, in these 2,000 pound bins.

Heat loosens up the skins so these scraps can fall off.

Then the garlic goes onto this conveyor belt.

Because garlic is a root crop, sometimes you're going to have some staining all around the skins and it's our job to make it give that perfect appearance that you're used to at the market.

Ken runs sales for the ranch and checks that all the bulbs look package pretty.

The crew's job is to go through and physically clean every single one of these bulbs.

Every day, workers inspect about 200,000 pounds worth.

Then machines sort the bulbs into seven groups, depending on their size.

The smallest bulbs fall through these tight chains.

As the links get bigger, they let in bigger bulbs.

You're going to have the largest bulbs coming here on the left lanes, and if we go to the middle lanes, we'll have the middle-sized bulbs, and on the far right, we're going to have the smallest bulbs that we're going to pack for our customers.

They're easier to chop into finer pieces and give chefs more control over how garlicky their food tastes.

Different customers require different kinds of garlic.

Some customers want smaller bulbs and sleeves.

Some customers want garlic in display trays.

Some customers want their garlic in 30-pound boxes.

But only the smoothest, cleanest bulbs will make it into the shipments that leave this warehouse.

Christopher Ranch says that's only about 60% of all the garlic they harvest.

The rest will get processed in another room, but we'll get back to that.

Another crew checks for any lingering dirty skin that might make the bulbs less valuable.

And then essentially the final part is they're just cleaning it and it goes into a box.

And this is going to be found at retailers starting next week.

About 5% of the garlic Christopher Ranch produces leaves the country, going to Canada, Japan,

Our business models split into retail, food service and industrial.

The company ships these boxes off to major chains like Costco, Kroger, Trader Joe's and

In some of our relationships with companies like Blue Apron, they've mentioned that garlic is the one constant they have in every single box of product they ship out nationwide.

On a typical day, they'll fill seven semi-trucks with garlic.

Things were different when Ken's grandfather started the company in 1956, when he only sold to a produce market in San Francisco.

When he started, he was almost a joke in town.

Garlic was very much a niche crop, a niche vegetable.

The kind of garlic that's popular in the U.S. today was brought over by Spanish explorers in the 1500s.

But it wasn't until Italian immigrants came to California in the late 1800s that the crop found its home in Gilroy.

Well into the 1950s, it was mostly popular among immigrant communities that faced discrimination.

Only niche markets carried the vegetable, and it stayed out of the mainstream for decades.

Things started to change in the late 80s, when American scientists confirmed the ingredient was really good for you.

It contains a natural antibiotic called allicin, which can help prevent blood clots.

Garlic became newsworthy, and its popularity continued to grow.

So you take a whole garlic head like that, and you know it takes a long time to take each clove off and peel it.

America's gotten a whole lot more diverse.

So as America's cultural palates become more diverse, garlic's moved from being very side plate to being center plate.

In the 1990s, garlic finally became one of the most produced crops in America.

The only problem was that the white skins stain easily, so a lot of it was hard to sell because Americans wouldn't buy bulbs that didn't look perfect.

That's where Ken's grandfather Don saw an opportunity.

Because garlic is so time and labor intensive to grow, we want to find a home for every single pound.

Christopher Ranch was the first company in America to sell the crop peeled.

They invented this machine that could peel hundreds of cloves in minutes, and produce garlic Americans were willing to pay 50% more for.

It gave the ranch an edge over its American competitors.

Within the first few years, peeled garlic accounted for 10% of Christopher Ranch's revenue.

Today, their machines peel more than a million pounds of garlic every week.

First, the bruised up bulbs go into these giant drums, called crackers, which use rubber rollers to break them down into cloves.

Then a 60-person crew sorts them again, chucking out the completely rotten ones.

Giant machines portion the cloves into cups, and blast them with compressed air.

Most peelers do that at around 116 pounds per square inch.

That's about three to four times the air pressure of a car tire.

Machines whip the garlic around at 1,200 revolutions per minute, and those stubborn shells fly right off.

They upgrade their machines every few years.

Their newest one can peel 100,000 pounds of garlic in an eight-hour shift.

These computers can identify which cloves are going to be OK for our final pack.

They're going to identify where the gross defects are.

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How The US' Biggest Garlic Producer Survived The Fall Of American Garlic | Big Business

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