Featured Member - O & J Growers By Joe Amador - O & J Growers O&J Growers was born in April of 1992. Jose Arellano partnered with Odilon Diaz to purchase a company called Andre Flowers. Odilon was the managing supervisor for Andre at the time. Along with the sale of the company, they acquired the land, approximately 2.5 acres, and most importantly, the farm in Mexico, Rancho de Las Flores. In the beginning years, they encountered that the daily "tough" decisions of owning a business was exactly that "Tough". They started with an overused van that would make daily deliveries 7 days a week, and an older truck that would occasionally break-down to and from Mexico. They also only had one employee working the warehouse & picking up/delivering flowers. Jose & Odilon's dedication and pride kept them both motivated with many tasks, such as: buying; selling; handling accounts; manual labor; and the overseeing & running of the farm in Mexico. "Tough" was merely an understatement, but with hard work comes success, and with some faith and sacrifice, just like our flowers, O&J's began to bloom. In 2002, O& J Growers added a second location inside the Los Angeles Flower District. In 2005, we decided to not only sell flowers to local wholesale companies in southern California, but to become a competitor in the national shipping industry as well. O&J Growers specializes in many different cut flower varieties such as Sunflowers, Larkspur, Stock, Bells of Ireland, Green Mist, Amaranthus, Bupleurum, & Wax flower, just to name a few. We produce premium cut flowers from 250 acres of open field production in Baja California, Mexico. We're located just north of San Diego on California's southern coast. We ensure that our customers will receive the freshest and most beautiful product and give special attention to our customers' specific needs. In the last few years, O&J's has been upgrading and expanding our facility to accommodate our continuous growth. We've created a sales office for our sales team consisting of Bruce Blake, Missie Ray, Joe Amador, and Alyssa Pulido for sales support. We also installed brand new premium coolers to handle more volumes of flowers, as well as adding more square footage to the packing, shipping, and receiving department. We have a fleet of dependable delivery trucks & a brand new tractor trucks bringing us beautiful flowers from Mexico. We want to reach out to all of our California Floral members and offer them the opportunity to tell their story in the NORCAL News. We will showcase the member as the feature article each week and will look to give an opportunity to each member who would like to participate. Topics are open and flexible. Members can discuss their companies, product specials, seasonal offerings, history, industry news, company philosophy, employees...anything really that you would want fellow members to enjoy and/or know about. We have over 580 members nationwide, so your story will be widely read and best of all it's FREE. It's just one way that we can show our appreciation to the members who support the Association.