Jacob Kremple

Yeah, absolutely.

Very excited to be here.

I have quite a few friends that are flabbergasted that I get to be on OddLots of all things.

So I'm excited to talk tomatoes.

Yeah, so Baldor is a 30-year-old food service distribution company based up in the Hunts Point Market area of Bronx here in New York City.

We distribute food from Maine to Northern Virginia, send out about 500 trucks a day with food, mostly to food service restaurants, right?

So about 70% restaurants, 30% independent retail or other wholesalers.

We got our start actually, you know, Balducci's in Greenwich Village.

Yeah, sure.

So Andy Balducci and Joe Doria.

Joe Doria was their produce sourcing guy.

And he was always out there looking for the best and most unique varieties that he could possibly find.

And so suddenly they saw a lot of chefs that they knew in the area shopping at their store.

had a great idea of starting a wholesale distribution company.

So they took Balducci and Doria, combined them together.

That's actually how you get Baldor, which is a fun story.

So that was in the 70s, 80s.

That business grew, expanded, started to blow up.

They spun it off as a separate company in 91 when Andy Balducci's son-in-law, Kevin Murphy, took over the business.

He ran it until about 2013 when he passed away from cancer.