Kate Bradshaw

This fourth-generation dried fruit business supplies Raisin Bran’s raisins and has a street named after it at Apple headquarters.

Mariani Packing Company president George Sousa Jr. at the company’s facility in Vacaville, Calif., on Sept. 6, 2023. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)

This story was first published in The Mercury News on Sept. 22, 2023.

By Kate Bradshaw

If you’re a dried fruit lover, you may have spotted the Mariani name in the supermarket aisle — and not just on bags of raisins or dried apricots. The 117-year-old Mariani Packing Company sells dried pineapple, mango and banana chips, too, and more cranberries than you could ever imagine.

Today, the Vacaville-based company is led by George Sousa Jr., the fourth generation to manage this family business with operations around the world. But it all started in 1906, when Croatian-born Paul Mariani followed his high school sweetheart and her family to Silicon Valley. The couple married, bought an orchard in Cupertino and opened a dried fruit business. It’s still going strong, having survived multiple moves and a shift to a global marketplace — and an if-only-we’d-known, missed opportunity to sell land to Apple before the tech company made it big.

We caught up with Sousa to hear more about the world of dried fruit, the challenges related to shepherding a family business through multiple generations and what obstacles they’re working to overcome in the years ahead.

Full story here.