How We Came to Own an Italian Seed Company

Along about 2010, life for me was getting a little mundane. We had been farming since 1988, and my body was starting to suffer oil leaks and warning lights pretty regularly. Vegetable and flower growing, the way we did it, was a young person’s game. Our kids were grown. I had been working for the Kansas Rural Center for 20 years, and the joy was going out of grant writing and reporting to funders - which were big parts of every hot idea I ever tried to bring into reality.

Lynn’s magazine - Growing for Market - was humming along, and enriched her life every day, with new people and new ideas and beauty. She was on top of it.

One of her advertisers was a guy named Bill McKay, who owned Seeds from Italy. He operated out of his house in the northern suburbs of Boston. About 10 years earlier, trying to find vegetable varieties that his Italian grandmother used, and being frustrated, he decided to try to import them. One thing led to another. He bragged about it to all his friends and shared his seed and produce. Eventually, they asked him to bring some seed in for them, and the business was born.

Not to say that Italian seed hadn’t been flooding into the country for decades, but generally in pants pockets, at the bottom of the suitcases of nervous tourists, or (true story) as grape vine cuttings tucked in people’s underwear because “plants don’t show up on X-rays” as one customer told me. And prior to the heavy phytosanitary regime we now have, every immigrant brought seeds in their baggage. Some of those seeds, which we sell now, include Finocchio Selvatico - Wild Fennel - which has naturalized and grows all along the West Coast. It has been a common part of the biome for a hundred years or more. Another one, Bieta Verde da Taglio, a mild, prolific and tasty chard, is naturalized in the Bay Area, growing up through cracks in the concrete, from escaped seed grown by generations of Italian immigrants.

But if you wanted most of the thousands of open-pollinated Italian heirloom varieties of tomatoes, peppers, chicories, herbs, cucumber-melons, basil, zucchinis, arugula, etc., the ones Italians eat every day, the easiest way to get them was to fly to Italy and smuggle them home.

So Bill started a business.

Bill was a good guerrilla marketer. He appeared on Martha Stewart’s TV show. He was interviewed every spring by garden writers. His only paid advertisement was in Lynn’s magazine, Growing for Market. His catalog was half-sized and contained one picture page with dozens of tiny photos of seed packets. The plant descriptions were in tiny, maybe 9-10 point type that almost required a magnifying glass to read. After we bought the company, we enlarged the catalog with variety pictures and 12 point type. I recall a letter from one person who upon receiving the newly formatted catalog, wrote to say we had ruined the company.

So Bill built the business, but it had been a retirement project in his 60s and he was ready to really retire. He called Lynn one day in 2010 to re-up his advertisement in GFM. He and Lynn are both good at conversation, and in the course of their chat, he mentioned he thought he had already sold the business, but the buyer had fallen through, so here he was, advertising one more year.

Lynn, knowing of my loss of enthusiasm with my work, inquired about the details of the business. I was in New Orleans for a conference at the time. She said she would talk to me when I got back, and he told her his best retail store outlet was Central Market, in the French Quarter right across from the Cafe du Monde. The next day, I wandered over before lunch. The place was famous for its muffaletta sandwiches and there was a line out the door. But it was also a grocery, so I wandered in and looked at a wall rack full of these beautiful seed packets.

I talked to a woman stocking shelves and she told me they sold really well. I said, “But there is hardly any vegetable growing space in the French Quarter, why would people buy so much seed?” She said, “I don’t know. It’s New Orleans. Maybe people are smoking them.” I bought some packs to carry home and show Lynn. Interestingly, an Italian friend of ours in Topeka had brought us some of the same lettuce varieties years earlier, when we were market gardening there.

So we just kept talking with Bill, and he introduced us to Giampiero Franchi, the owner and head of the family that had started the business in 1783.

One of the pleasures of working with a 240-year-old family business is the archive of vintage photographs and seed catalogs, including from the 1940s during WWII - Italian Victory Gardens. Turns out spoons, tiny paper packets, glue pots and ranks of women in long dresses were important at one point.

Giampiero is an engineer and hadn’t assumed he would become the seventh generation owner, but the time came, and the family called. He was the obvious one.

Lynn and I got Bill’s financial data and took it to Will Katz at the KU business center. Will was invaluable, and helped us create cash flow spreadsheets which we used to negotiate the company’s worth with Bill McKay. Because Bill was self-financing the business, allowing us to pay it off using profits coming in over a couple of years, the spreadsheets helped him too. Realizing that asking for too much would sabotage efforts to pay it off helped us negotiate a lower price, one that we could afford, would keep us solvent, and would get him paid.

The whole negotiation period was very amicable. We liked Bill and he liked us. Everyone wished the best for the other. One thing we’ve learned in building and passing on businesses, whether the farm, or Lynn’s magazine, is that these small quirky efforts are works of love. Certainly there is a sale of equipment, inventory, knowledge, procedure, brands and goodwill. But ultimately, the business will continue based on the new owners getting up in the morning and working, thinking, building and responding. When selling businesses like these, one is selling a job — work — to the new owner. That owner buys his own work because it is what they want to do, and if they don’t do it, it dies.

I traveled to Boston and spent two days with Bill, studying how he did everything. He lived in an enormous, 200-year-old house, built on a slope, with a huge, unheated basement featuring a cement floor that had been poured around numerous Volkswagen-sized granite boulders. Head height varied from crawl space to 7 feet. Boxes of seed were stacked and stashed all around in various alcoves between the boulders. He had found it too cold to work there during the winter, so he had added a small, heated room upstairs where he could pack orders.

We agreed on a transfer date in summer 2011. I informed the Kansas Rural Center that I was “retiring”, or whatever you call it when I wouldn’t be working there anymore. KRC was in a relatively good position, with great staff and funding for a year or two. I said my goodbyes.

We visited Franchi Sementi in Bergamo, north of Milan, in early summer 2011. Giampiero had used his engineering training to set up a beautiful new facility on the road to Brescia. Though Bergamo itself is an amazingly beautiful old city, that road illustrates the industrial might of Northern Italy, with modern factories and warehouses lining a super highway for mile after mile. Though Italy is often thought of as an old and tired economy, it is the eighth largest in the world and third largest in the European Union. And much of that economy is based in manufacture for export of an amazing amount of everyday items, but also extremely high-value luxury goods.

The Franchi facility had the latest packing equipment, spotless seed-testing labs, and extensive gardens used for growing out seed lots to assure consistency. We continue to be amazed at how viable and consistent the seed is, despite it being almost entirely heirloom varieties. Visits to farmers markets and farm stores there reveal that Italians love Franchi seed too.

Back home, our farm and out-buildings allowed us to house the company, though we rented a climate-controlled storage unit for overflow seed. We set up a packing room in our basement, with storage racks for replenishing what we called the Wall of Seeds. The Wall of Seeds was row after row of pegged racks with 30 or more packets of each variety at hand. As orders came in, they could easily be gathered. Within a year, we had insulated and refurbished our packing shed and air-conditioned it for seed storage. We switched to flower farming which mostly entailed harvesting very close to delivery time, so we needed less packing space. Still, the garage was often full of sacks of garlic and other items.

One day, we got a phone call. It was a USDA inspector. He was at the bottom of our lane, and he informed us he was coming up to take possession of all our corn seed. There is a plethora of import regulations, and we hadn’t realized that sweet corn was not permitted, though it was plainly listed on all our import documents and had been inspected and passed by USDA. Another year, we got a call asking us how much warehouse space we had available because they were going to require us to recall all the brown lentil seed we had sold for the same reason. We had sold the equivalent of about two kilos of seed, in small garden packets, to 20 or so gardeners all over the country, who had already planted it. In other words, we wouldn’t need much more warehouse space than a shoe box, but the big problem was that the seed was planted and growing. I gathered the zip codes of the gardeners, and offered to contact them, because I didn’t want them to get a call from USDA that they were in their driveway and were going to be digging in their garden. Well, that went up the line, and eventually, a supervisor realized the folly of all that, and it was dropped.

In another instance, about $5,000 of our beautiful European garlic seed arrived, but a new disease had been detected in Europe, and we were asked to prove the fields they came from had been tested and were not infected. The seed eventually went back to Europe and we have had to access U.S. garlic since then, though none of it has ever been of European quality.

Through the first several years, the kids stayed involved. We were considering selling the farm due to my increasing feebleness, and when the chance came to refurbish another building, the former garage at the Sunrise Garden Center in Lawrence, we did, and there Seeds from Italy remains. The business is now passing on to the next generation, with our son, Will, running it.

Most of our orders come in via the internet, though we still print and mail a colorful catalog, Many of our longtime customers are Italian, and some are elderly and not interested in online shopping, so it is a bow to them. We regularly talk to customers who are gardening well into their 80s and 90s.

The Covid 19 horror stories first broke worldwide in Bergamo, with hundreds and hundreds of deaths in the city and surrounds. Many young people work in Bergamo and Milan, but return home in the evenings where they dwell with their aging parents. They were dragging Covid home, and the elderly were the first victims. With some stoppage, Franchi managed to remain open. Strict isolation was enforced to a much greater extent in Europe than in the U.S. A seed company was considered vital and exempted. Their facility was well-ventilated, masks were de rigueur, and isolation was worked around. Still, supply lines broke. We received a substantial part of our seed order for the year, but we sold out by May of 2020, in part because sales were so good. Seeds are a counter-cyclical product. When disaster raises its head, people look to garden more. Covid did hurt our sales through retail outlets, part of their general suffering as people stayed home, but the catalog and internet pulled us through.

Homeland Security inspections have also become a regular regulatory hurdle. Some years, our container is opened and dozens of boxes and packets are sliced up, ruining the packets for sale. This can be done by either Homeland Security or USDA Phytosanitary inspectors. Other years, the containers are simply waved on through.

One wonderful benefit for us has been the excuse to travel often to Italy. We’ve been to the Salone del Gusto in Torino a couple of times, working in the Franchi booth at that international rare and endangered foods festival. Many of our varieties are world-heritage worthy and protected. But aside from that, Franchi has endeavored to treat us as family. We’ve been invited twice to week-long, all-expenses (save for international travel) group vacations with other seed dealers. There we’ve made good friends with Europeans from places we never could have imagined - Italians, Spaniards, Romanians, Macedonians and Serbs. Some we remain very close to. An interesting thing, which I never realized, is that though the U.S. culture is more world dominant than it should be, not many Europeans have spent quality time with Americans. They’ve encountered them briefly as tourists, or when traveling themselves, but never any long exposure. I think we were a surprise in many ways. Twice, these trips have happened on our wedding anniversary, and in both cases we were serenaded in restaurants by large groups of people. It was very touching.

What has remained consistent throughout our ownership, approaching 15 years now, is the quality of the seeds. And we have remained a family business, and our family has to get up and work everyday, so that the Franchi family can continue their business, too, and people can grow the gardens they want.

Seeds from Italy: growitalian.com

Growing for Market: https://growingformarket.com/