Local produce goes global - 13abc.com Toledo (OH) News, Weather and Sports

Produce from right here in Northwest Ohio has gone global. Hundreds of different kinds of vegetables are harvested at The Chef's Garden in Erie County and then shipped all over the world.

With more than 100 employees and an impressive list of clients, The Chef's Garden is an international produce powerhouse. The Huron farm is tucked between the Ohio turnpike and the shores of Lake Erie. It is owned by Farmer Lee Jones and his family, "We grow 700-800 different items on 300 acres and we only farm half the land every year, so for us it is really about quality and integrity rather than quantity."

Lee says The Chef's Garden traces it's roots back to the loss of the Jones family farm, "Years back we were farming commercially and chemically and we ran across tough times in the early 1980's and it gave us an opportunity to re-focus and re-think the way we were farming. At the time it didn't seem like an opportunity, but you learn to turn lemons into lemonade."

The Chef's Garden ships its produce to some of the most famous chefs and restaurants around Ohio,  the country and the globe. Just to give you an idea how much the business has grown, they ship to Hong Kong and more than a dozen other countries once a week. A look at the shipping labels is a virtual who's who in the culinary world, "Wolfgang Puck, Danielle's, Charlie Trotter's, The Ritz Carleton, Alain Ducasse, The Four Seasons."

Lee's brother Bob says things have changed quite a bit since he was little, "I can remember it being a big deal to ride into Cleveland with my dad with a truck of produce and now we ship to Hong Kong every Friday so I guess things change."

Bob says The Chef's Garden uses what's called sustainable farming practices, "What we have tried to do is take the best of the commercial farmers model and the best of the organic model and marry them in the middle and call it sustainable."

Bob adds that a lot of what they do is nothing new, many of the farming practices date back more than a century,"People are now paying more attention to where their food comes from and how it's grown. Most farmers have been operating under a sustainable model for years. It's just that now people happen to care about it."

In addition to the old practices they do use a lot of technology. For example, they have a hand held scanner for their food safety program that tells them who picked a certain vegetable, what field it came from and where it's going.

And it's not just fancy restaurants that can serve produce from The Chef's Garden, they are now offering home delivery.