Bonita Springs Tomato Packing Plants?
Most Americans do not get to see the tomato before it gets to the grocery store. They don’t know what a tomato plant looks like or that a tomato is picked green in the commercial farming process. A few weeks ago I spoke of Bonita Springs being the tomato capital of the world, back in the day. It was not uncommon to see Gargiulo trucks hauling loads of tomatoes all over town.
These days the trucks make the trip from fields in Immokalee and Naples to the Bonita Beach Road exit on i-75. If you get to this intersection and pay close attention to the green balls on the edge of the street you’ll quickly realize that all of the tomatoes do not make the turn successfully. The trucks turn on Old 41 Road and head south to the Gargiulo processing plant by the Rail Head industrial park. The green tomatoes are treated to ripen somewhere in the process.
Now you know when you see a truck like this, what is on board – unfried green tomatoes.