America used to produce almost all of its own garlic — until Chinese imports flooded in, bankrupting three-quarters of US producers. We visited the largest American grower, Christopher Ranch, to see how it's managed to get bigger than ever.
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00:00Christopher Ranch processes about 12 billion cloves of garlic a year, making it the biggest
00:08producer in the United States.
00:12Workers clean, peel, and pack all of it at this massive warehouse in Gilroy, California.
00:19As you can see, there's not a vampire to be seen.
00:23Garlic ripens once a year, and rots fast, so workers have just a few weeks to dig it
00:29all up.
00:30When it comes to garlic, we have one shot, and it's all going to be done by hand.
00:35The company is one of the last U.S. garlic producers.
00:40Most shut down when cheaper Chinese garlic began flooding the market in the 1990s.
00:47So how has Christopher Ranch survived the influx of imported, cheap garlic?
00:52And how did it help turn what was once considered a niche ingredient into one of the most popular
00:57vegetables in the U.S.?
01:03Christopher Ranch produces more than half of all garlic grown in the United States.
01:08Here, its crops span an area about half the size of Manhattan.
01:12In other words, one billion bulbs of garlic.
01:16That's Ken Christopher, grandson of the original Christopher, who gave the ranch its name in
01:211956, when he first started growing garlic on just 10 acres.
01:27Garlic is an asexual plant.
01:28It's essentially a clone of itself year after year.
01:31You're going to be guaranteed to have the same flavor profile throughout the decades.
01:35And so today, we can enjoy the same Italian, bold, zesty flavor that my grandfather first
01:40selected 60 years ago.
01:43They plant all of it in November.
01:49Bulbs grow underground over the span of nine months.
01:54Once they're ready, farmers have about a month to dig everything up by hand.
02:00Machines would rip the garlic's thin layers of skin, making it harder to sell and quicker
02:05to rot.
02:06There simply is no automated process.
02:08The hand selection process remains the best.
02:11They'll ripen between June and August.
02:14So the company hires an extra 3,000 workers for just those few months.
02:19American farmers often struggle to recruit people for this work.
02:23So the ranch hires workers from Mexico on temporary agricultural visas.
02:27One problem you're going to find with a lot of farmers in this area is labor.
02:31How can we possibly get enough people to produce the food that Americans eat?
02:36And it takes hundreds more hands at giant warehouses like these to get produce like
02:40garlic store-ready.
02:41It's critical to get it into one of these rooms as fast as we can.
02:47Did they get it off the railing?
02:53Each one of our 100 million pounds, wherever they're grown in California, all come home
02:57to here.
03:00Workers wheel it all in, in these 2,000 pound bins.
03:06It's 90 degrees in here.
03:08Heat loosens up the skins so these scraps can fall off.
03:15Then, the garlic goes onto this conveyor belt.
03:18Because garlic is a root crop, sometimes you're going to have some staining all around the
03:21skins and it's our job to give that perfect appearance that you're used to at the market.
03:27Ken runs sales for the ranch and checks that all the bulbs look package pretty.
03:31The crew's job is to go through and physically clean every single one of these bulbs.
03:36Every day, workers inspect about 200,000 pounds worth.
03:41Then, machines sort the bulbs into seven groups, depending on their size.
03:47The smallest bulbs fall through these tight chains.
03:51As the links get bigger, they let in bigger bulbs.
03:54You're going to have the largest bulbs coming here on the left lanes, and if we go to the
03:57middle lanes, we'll have the middle-sized bulbs, and on the far right, we're going to
04:00have the smallest bulbs that we're going to pack for our customers.
04:05Restaurants usually go for the big ones.
04:07Those have larger cloves.
04:09They're easier to chop into finer pieces and give chefs more control over how garlicky
04:14their food tastes.
04:16Different customers require different kinds of garlic.
04:18Some customers want very large bulbs.
04:21Some customers want smaller bulbs and sleeves.
04:23Some customers want garlic in display trays.
04:25Some customers want their garlic in 30-pound boxes.
04:27But only the smoothest, cleanest bulbs will make it into the shipments that leave this
04:32warehouse.
04:33Christopher Ranch says that's only about 60% of all the garlic they harvest.
04:39The rest will get processed in another room, but we'll get back to that.
04:44Another crew checks for any lingering dirty skin that might make the bulbs less valuable.
04:48And then essentially the final part is they're just cleaning it and it goes into a box.
04:52And this is going to be found at retailers starting next week.
04:56About 5% of the garlic Christopher Ranch produces leaves the country, going to Canada, Japan,
05:02Mexico or New Zealand.
05:05All the rest stays in the U.S.
05:07Our business models split into retail, food service and industrial.
05:12The company ships these boxes off to major chains like Costco, Kroger, Trader Joe's and
05:17Safeway across all 50 states.
05:20In some of our relationships with companies like Blue Apron, they've mentioned that garlic
05:24is the one constant they have in every single box of product they ship out nationwide.
05:29On a typical day, they'll fill seven semi-trucks with garlic.
05:35Things were different when Ken's grandfather started the company in 1956, when he only
05:40sold to a produce market in San Francisco.
05:43When he started, he was almost a joke in town.
05:46Garlic was very much a niche crop, a niche vegetable.
05:51The kind of garlic that's popular in the U.S. today was brought over by Spanish explorers
05:55in the 1500s.
05:58But it wasn't until Italian immigrants came to California in the late 1800s that the crop
06:02found its home in Gilroy.
06:06Well into the 1950s, it was mostly popular among immigrant communities that faced discrimination.
06:13Only niche markets carried the vegetable, and it stayed out of the mainstream for decades.
06:19Things started to change in the late 80s, when American scientists confirmed the ingredient
06:24was really good for you.
06:25It contains a natural antibiotic called allicin, which can help prevent blood clots.
06:32Garlic became newsworthy, and its popularity continued to grow.
06:38So you take a whole garlic head like that, and you know it takes a long time to take
06:42each clove off and peel it.
06:44America's gotten a whole lot more diverse.
06:46So as America's cultural palates become more diverse, garlic's moved from being very side
06:51plate to being center plate.
06:53In the 1990s, garlic finally became one of the most produced crops in America.
06:59The only problem was that the white skins stain easily, so a lot of it was hard to sell
07:04because Americans wouldn't buy bulbs that didn't look perfect.
07:09That's where Ken's grandfather Don saw an opportunity.
07:12Because garlic is so time and labor intensive to grow, we want to find a home for every
07:16single pound.
07:18Christopher Ranch was the first company in America to sell the crop peeled.
07:23They invented this machine that could peel hundreds of cloves in minutes, and produce
07:29garlic Americans were willing to pay 50% more for.
07:34It gave the ranch an edge over its American competitors.
07:38Within the first few years, peeled garlic accounted for 10% of Christopher Ranch's revenue.
07:44Today, their machines peel more than a million pounds of garlic every week.
07:51First, the bruised up bulbs go into these giant drums, called crackers, which use rubber
07:57rollers to break them down into cloves.
08:00Then a 60 person crew sorts them again, chucking out the completely rotten ones.
08:06And the pretty guys?
08:08They go into a special room.
08:11Giant machines portion the cloves into cups, and blast them with compressed air.
08:16Most peelers do that at around 116 pounds per square inch.
08:21That's about three to four times the air pressure of a car tire.
08:26Machines whip the garlic around at 1,200 revolutions per minute, and those stubborn shells fly
08:32right off.
08:34They upgrade their machines every few years.
08:37Their newest one can peel 100,000 pounds of garlic in an eight hour shift.
08:42These computers can identify which cloves are going to be okay for our final pack.
08:47They're going to identify where the gross defects are.
08:49They're going to identify sunburn.
08:51And using automation, we can fire small streams of air, kick out the bad cloves, and let the
08:55good ones go by.
08:56In effect, saving a whole lot on labor costs.
08:59Today, peeled garlic accounts for 40% of the company's revenue.
09:04But Ken says they've constantly looked for new ways to keep up with growing competition
09:09from China.
09:12The U.S. started to import cheap garlic from China shortly after the Cold War.
09:16But Chinese bulbs sold for almost 50% less than American ones.
09:22The U.S. government accused Chinese producers of trying to gain a monopoly by selling garlic
09:27for less than what it takes to grow it, also known as dumping.
09:32By the mid-90s, Christopher Ranch sales had fallen by half, and the company started laying
09:37off workers.
09:38The U.S. government tried to control it with anti-dumping duties in 1994.
09:43But Chinese imports continued.
09:46And by 2004, the U.S. was importing over half of the garlic it consumed.
09:52Between 2001 and 2005, Christopher Ranch had slashed the land it farmed by 40%.
09:59And during this period, the U.S. garlic industry was losing an estimated $600 million to Chinese
10:05imports.
10:07Meanwhile, in China, garlic was beating gold stocks, becoming the country's most lucrative
10:12asset.
10:13Before the 1990s, nearly all the garlic consumed in America was grown in America.
10:17There used to be 12 commercial garlic growers in the country.
10:20Now we're down to three.
10:21And Ken often spoke about it, even on TV, as seen in this clip.
10:25He's just back from Washington, D.C., where he lobbied to help win a new 10% tariff on
10:30Chinese garlic.
10:31One of the hardest things I've ever done was actually going to D.C. and testifying and
10:35offering evidence that the Chinese continue to impact and negatively hurt the domestic
10:40garlic industry.
10:41In 2018, then-U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 10% tariff on garlic coming from
10:48China.
10:50That tariff rose to 25% in 2019.
10:53And President Biden has kept them in place.
10:57In the past decade, China imports dropped overall.
11:00But the country remains America's main foreign supplier.
11:04Imports are applied before it even enters the country.
11:06So we found that they were incredibly effective.
11:11Keeping the company profitable has required constant innovation, though.
11:16Over the years, they've launched dozens of new products that Americans would pay more
11:20for, like minced, crushed, pickled, or chopped garlic.
11:25We've really had to upgrade our skill set in that respect.
11:27You're not always going to get perfect bulbs like the one you see here.
11:30We try to use every piece that we can.
11:33And this facility churns out 100,000 pounds of roasted garlic every week, accounting for
11:395% of the company's sales.
11:42We're going to have a two-sided convection oven heat up the garlic to about 250 degrees.
11:46You can kind of see through a layer of garlic.
11:51Then they put it on these fans for 30 minutes.
11:54Oh, I didn't think we were going.
11:59It goes into this cooler next.
12:02It gets the temperature down to about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which helps make the garlic shelf
12:06stable and ready to ship across the country.
12:10They pack some of it into these 30-pound boxes and send it off to their warehouse to store.
12:17Their robots can portion out and seal up to 500 packages every hour.
12:23In a single day, Christopher Ranch cranks out about 200,000 pounds of garlic.
12:31They also sell garlic skins to local farmers as animal feed.
12:36Some of our garlic may not be perfect for restaurants, and so we're going to find a
12:39new home for it.
12:41But Ken says to stay competitive, they also had to sell Chinese garlic, but not under
12:46the Christopher Ranch name.
12:48And the packaging doesn't say grown in California, like these boxes do.
12:52You want to zoom on this.
12:53This is kind of the most important.
12:58In 2018, a Netflix documentary, Rotten, accused the company of selling Chinese garlic peeled
13:04by prisoners under its own name.
13:07Christopher Ranch has denied those allegations.
13:10They made a critical mistake.
13:11This is a streaming and living thing that continues to impact our brand and our business.
13:16We are an ethical company.
13:17We're a company that strives to be the best.
13:19And we only work with suppliers that bring it into this country and that have the same
13:24certifications and documentations that we'd expect of our garlic.
13:28Today, Chinese garlic accounts for about 8 to 10 percent of the company's revenue.
13:33But American garlic is still the choice of all chefs who participate in the California
13:38Garlic Festival, one of the biggest garlic fairs in the U.S.
13:42Ooh, garlic.
13:45Julie Linesburg has been the head chef of the event since 2022.
13:50She bought 300 pounds of garlic from Christopher Ranch to prepare food for three days.
13:56The garlic is a bit sweeter.
13:58When you flip it over, if you see that brown, hairy bottom, you know it's out of our ground,
14:03our beautiful soil.
14:04If it's nice and bleached and flat, you know it came from somewhere else very, very far
14:08away.
14:09Julie runs a team of 40 kitchen staff at the official Festival Tent.
14:13Let's open it all the way, so when they get here, it's a fast process.
14:18She got here at 6.30 in the morning to prep before thousands of festival goers start arriving
14:24at noon.
14:25We're not frying.
14:26We have no customers.
14:27Everything's got to be fresh, fresh, fresh.
14:29All day, they'll prepare nothing but the two signature dishes created by Julie herself,
14:34garlic fries and garlic bread.
14:37It may sound simple, but she's thought of every detail carefully.
14:41Our special concoction, and then they will put parm and or bacon.
14:46Julie uses 200 pounds of Parmesan, imported only from Italy.
14:50Make sure we're getting some of this from the bottom, OK?
14:53How much garlic is in that?
14:55A lot.
14:56Can I say a lot?
14:57So this is where the garlic bread happens.
14:59We're toasting it on a charbroiler.
15:02In three days, they go through about 600 loaves of soft French bread from a local bakery and
15:07300 pounds of butter.
15:10Once it gets nice and toasty, it comes over here, and it gets dipped in this special concoction
15:16that smells just a little bit like garlic.
15:18It's garlic and butter and some other things.
15:21She uses pre-minced garlic.
15:23She buys from Christopher Ranch as a base and adds some fresh ground on top.
15:28And then we wrap it, and here is an order of garlic bread.
15:31Smell-o-vision.
15:32I don't know if the camera captures that, but...
15:34Then we will run it by the boss, make sure it's the right size for him.
15:42Every new batch needs to be approved by Tony Nocchetti, the organizer of the festival.
15:50Tony's in charge of the garlic pesto pasta, a recipe he learned from his Italian grandmother.
15:55This ain't McDonald's here.
15:56This is Nonna's stuff back at the ranch in the old days, you know?
16:00So I enjoy cooking, and that way I get to eat.
16:04Tony farms walnuts, but everyone here knows him as the guy who saved the garlic festival
16:09in California.
16:11We heard a few years ago that the garlic festival was going to close, and it's been the longest
16:15running festival here in California.
16:16Well, that's when I stepped in and said, we're going to continue to keep the garlic festival
16:21alive.
16:22The city of Gilroy used to run the largest garlic festival, but decided to drop it in
16:272022.
16:29Three years earlier, a mass shooting at the festival caused insurance rates to spike,
16:34and the COVID-19 pandemic slashed turnout in 2020, a year after that.
16:39It was a legacy that we thought we couldn't let go.
16:41I mean, it's just part of our life cycle here in California.
16:45We believe in local business, local products.
16:48That's very important, keeping our local economies going.
16:51Though this is technically a different festival, Tony invested more than half a million dollars
16:56out of his own pocket to continue the tradition near its former home in Gilroy.
17:01It's important for agriculture, the community, the people.
17:04There's so many people involved in agriculture throughout California and throughout the world.
17:09Julie, wave to the camera.
17:11Hi, everybody.
17:14Without her, this wouldn't go.
17:15She even gives me orders.
17:16And I think I'm the boss now.
17:17She's the boss in the kitchen.
17:19This year, nearly 16,000 people attended the festival, more than double the attendance
17:24in 2023.
17:25Cali Garlic Alley is open for business.
17:29Follow the smell.
17:31Garlic fries, garlic bread, and how about some garlic pasta?
17:35Garlic, garlic, garlic.
17:37That's how I grew up as in a Filipino family.
17:41My mom cooks everything with garlic.
17:44And it keeps the vampires away.
17:45Yeah.
17:46They hate it.
17:48About 150 vendors from all over the state signed up, using California garlic on chicken.
17:54All right, here's the magic.
17:56More garlic.
17:57Pork.
17:58Our famous pork belly.
17:59And even honey and butter.
18:00Would you guys like to try a free sample?
18:02We'd like it.
18:03It would be a sad, sad place to be without garlic.
18:07Yes, ma'am.
18:08Well, I'm glad I get it right now.
18:11One vendor here even puts garlic in ice cream.
18:14Ice cream.
18:15Garlic ice cream.
18:16It's different.
18:17Yeah.
18:18He's Italian, so they eat a lot of garlic.
18:24And in my culture, which is Cambodian, we eat a lot of garlic, too.
18:27But to infuse it into an ice cream, it's amazing.
18:30I love it.
18:31I'm not sharing.
18:32Okay.
18:33Garlic ice cream.
18:35But some festival goers told us it wasn't just about buying local.
18:39It's amazing.
18:41It has healing properties.
18:42It's very good for your body.
18:44It acts like an antibiotic.
18:46I garlic in the morning, in the afternoon.
18:49So I have to be careful when I'm engaging with people, because they'll smell the garlic
18:57before they see me.
18:59Ken says these are the customers who will keep the business going.
19:03We're finding that Americans want the safest and healthiest product for them and their
19:06family.
19:07Christopher Ranch has its own tent here, selling minced, peeled, and organic bulbs.
19:12The company used to supply all the garlic for the original festival back in Gilroy,
19:16since co-founding it in 1979.
19:19Nowadays, other producers participate, too.
19:23But Ken says organic only recently became a trend here.
19:26About 10 years ago, we started really investing in our organic program.
19:30And since then, we've scaled up.
19:32They started off with about a million pounds of organic garlic, which was grown without
19:37pesticides, fertilizers, or hormones.
19:40That often means producing it takes more work, and the garlic has a greater chance at rotting,
19:46which is part of what makes organic more expensive.
19:49But Americans have been buying more of it anyway.
19:53Today, Christopher Ranch grows 15 million pounds of organic garlic, about 20% of its
19:59annual crop.
20:00We found that to be our best profit, Martian Center.
20:03As inflation goes up, as the cost of labor goes up, as we have more scarcity for land
20:07and water, really pivoting towards organics and a more high-end heirloom program is going
20:11to be the path forward.
20:14As for the produce Christopher Ranch doesn't sell during the harvest season, each one of
20:17the rooms behind me, we're going to store millions of pounds of garlic from our harvest.
20:21And as you can see, we have garlic that was harvested at the end of June in 2023.
20:26So last week, we just opened up the room behind me, and the garlic is every good as you could
20:30hope for.
20:32The garlic you see here essentially goes to sleep for 12 months.
20:36They can pull garlic from here all year.
20:39You can remove the oxygen from the room, lower the temperature, and keep your product safe.
20:44But Ken says farming is always a gamble.
20:47Over the past decade, droughts in California have made it harder to grow in the area.
20:52And Silicon Valley is expanding, making land a lot more expensive than it used to be.
20:58Meanwhile, America's appetite for garlic is still growing.
21:02The country consumed over $4.5 billion worth in 2023.
21:08And Ken says regardless of how or where his ranch harvests it, he's confident homegrown
21:14garlic will never go away.
21:16How important is garlic to your family?
21:19Garlic means nothing to me.
21:22Garlic is a part of our DNA.
21:23It's part of our culture.
21:24It's part of who we are.
21:25It's an inspiration for our whole family.