Red Tomato: is the juice worth the squeeze?

• Position: Nonprofit produce marketer

"Kate, you're way too smart to be selling watermelons." With a rollicking laugh, Kate Larson, Red Tomato's director of sales, recalls the comment she heard one day on the job. But to Larson, selling big, juicy watermelons to Boston-area markets is a small part of a challenging task she's set for herself. It's about much more than the price of watermelons: it's about food supply systems, globalization, economic diversity, and other big, juicy ideas.

The staff at Red Tomato, a nonprofit group based in Canton, Mass., is struggling to develop wholesale markets for small farmers from across the Northeast. At a time when the usual advice to farmers is to cut out the middleman and pursue direct sales, it's a rough trait to blaze.

"It's not an easy job, but it's our job," says Michael Rozyne, Red Tomato's founder. And it's an essential job, in his view. That direct farmer-to-consumer link is part of the answer, he says, but not the whole answer. Mid-size producers and remote farms without nearby customer bases need distribution networks and wholesale strategies. Red Tomato is trying to address the needs of those growers, going so far as to lease trucks and warehouse space, pick up the produce, and deliver it to supermarket chains and wholesalers. The strategy: by offering freshness, flavor, and high quality to buyers, Red Tomato hopes to "grow" a stable market that will deliver fair prices to farmers.

Since it began, in 1998, Red Tomato has been an exercise...