Chelan Fresh Merging with Borton Fruit

Two giants in Central Washington fruit production are merging with Chelan Fresh and Borton Fruit combining forces but retaining the Chelan Fresh name.

Mac Riggan said this will provide them a better platform to increase their level of customer service.

“When you combine our import program and the 30,000-plus acres of farmland from Yakima to the Canadian border, it just gives us a really diverse geographical area to pull high-quality fruit from.”

This will bring a lot of unique varieties of apples and cherries under the Chelan Fresh banner which Riggan says will allow them to supply customers even better.

The merger is actually a formalization of an existing relationship according to Riggan, that goes beyond growing.

“The Gebbers family and the Bortons jointly coach their kids in basketball, so there was a friendship and a comradery there and it led to talks about how could we help each other service customers better and so that’s basically just been formalized.”

Riggan said they’ve gotten a largely positive response from the industry and their customers on the merge and that they believe the cultures for employees are so similar it won’t be that different for workers.

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