Data Cultivation Workgroup Meeting

Gustavo A. Reyes joined Western Growers in December 2023. Before joining Western Growers, he worked for 2.5 years in the food industry where he implemented and managed food safety/quality systems. Gustavo completed his Ph.D. in Food Science and an M.S. in Applied Statistics from the University of Illinois, where he worked on building process models to advance food safety for produce systems. Gustavo earned his bachelor’s in food science from the University of Nebraska in 2017.

At Western Growers Gustavo is responsible for the coordination of the CA LGMA amendment process, generating technical resources for our members, and supporting data analysis and data sharing effort through GreenLink®.

In 2000, Steve Brazeel founded SunTerra Produce, which has grown from a one-person produce brokerage firm into an industry-leading, full-service platform handling sales, marketing, farming, food safety, harvesting, storage, and distribution activities for specialty crop producers on over 10,000 acres throughout the US and Mexico. Born out of SunTerra‘s participation in the USDA’s ground-breaking Farmers to Families Food Box program, Project FoodBox was launched in 2020. Since the program’s inception, the SunTerra/Project FoodBox teams have delivered over 85 Million pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables to communities in need through its network of food banks, community organizations, and health care plans.

Elevated Foods, founded by Mr. Brazeel in 2020, was recently awarded a $20M grant as part of USDA’s Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities program. Elevated was formed to bring more profit to farmers by incentivizing the adoption of new technologies & practices and providing technical support to help make them more efficient and resilient.