father passed away. Fortunately, I am blessed with
many great memories. Top of the list includes him
beaming with pride saying, “Mark, I thought you were
crazy, but you made a great decision.” Now you know
the rest of the story.
I am often asked what at
Blue Diamond
makes me the
most proud. This question has always been difficult for
me to answer. Succinctly. With so many fantastic people,
products, and positive changes, the list can go on and
on. The combination has certainly all contributed to
our ever-improving financial performance. If forced to
choose one single ingredient that makes me the most
excited to come to work, it would simply be that we
keep our promises to our grower-owners, team members,
customers, and communities.
If you attended this year’s annual meeting, I hope you
talked to your friends about the event and told them that
amazing professionals continue to collaborate
and innovate. And, we keep our promises.
My continuing promise remains, The Best is Yet
to Come!
Q & A with Mark Jansen: Meet Your Dynamic
Blue Diamond
Team Members
If you follow the business press, you will have read
how traditional food companies are struggling to grow.
The marketplace is changing rapidly, and they are
not keeping up. These food and beverage companies
change out their management teams and buy more
innovative companies in hopes of changing their culture
and performance. Most of these efforts have failed.
By choice,
Blue Diamond
is a growth business. Not
only is it more fun to grow a business, but it is also
the best way to serve growers, team members, and
customers. We are proud that based on volume
growth, revenue growth and market share growth,
Blue Diamond
was named a fastest growing midsize
company. Even better, for the second consecutive year!
Helping our customers grow, makes us a valuable and
often essential partner. Just as we did last year, we
want you to meet some of the dynamic
Blue Diamond
team members who make it possible to deliver on the
promise to grow our customers’ businesses profitably.
Jonas Paretzkin,
Director of eCommerce
Mark:
Three years
ago,
Blue Diamond
recognized that
Amazon was going
to change the way our
customers bought food,
just as it had already
done for books and so many other categories. We
knew we had to look outside of
Blue Diamond
to
recruit the unique talent that would help us get ahead
of this emerging trend. We are very fortunate that we
were able to lure away the eCommerce sales leader
of a $8 billion company, Con Agra, to build our
capability in this space. Most people are still buying
groceries in a store, but know eCommerce is growing
rapidly.
PRESIDENT’S CORNER
8
A L M O N D F A C T S
