Gilroy garlic company makes amends after critical documentary with wage increases

A Bay Area garlic producer that absorbed negative publicity said it has made some important reforms.

In January, a Netflix documentary accused Christopher Ranch in Gilroy of importing garlic processed by prison laborers in china.

The company has always denied this.

A few years ago, Christopher Ranch in Gilroy was facing a labor crisis. They were struggling to fulfill sales orders because they didn’t have enough workers.

Ken Christopher said they raised the hourly wage from $10 to $11 an hour, and still didn’t gain employees.

“We found there was no correlating increase in our labor force. That $1 increase didn’t do the trick,” said Christopher.

So in January 2017, with 50 job openings to fill at the processing plant, they made a bold move, raise the pay to $13 an hour right away, with a promise to raise it to $15 by the following year. That move worked.

“And in doing that, we immediately not only covered that deficit, but we actually had a waitlist of a 150 employees. So today, Christopher Ranch is able to run at full production capacity. We’re taking care of all our sales and cost per pound has actually stabilized,” Christopher said.

Ilse Torres started a year ago, and saw her annual salary go up by $4000 a year. Jesse Ortega has been here longer and saw his annual pay go up by $8000. He bought his kids new school clothes, a car, and sent them on vacation to Hawaii.

Earlier this year, Christopher Ranch was the target of a Netflix docuseries, alleging, among other things, the company sold garlic peeled by Chinese prison laborers.

Christopher Ranch strongly denied the allegations, and since then, you could say the company has had a coming out party, and has been on a push for full transparency.

They are now giving public tours, showing off their once-secret peeling machine that shoots jets of air into cups to strip the bulbs clean. And also their computerized sorting machine that uses optical recognition to pick out bad cloves.

The company said it’s an effort to show all their garlic is grown and processed in the U.S. and that they have nothing to hide.

Christopher said, “So, we learned a valuable lesson this year. Our consumers and our customers they demand 100% transparency. They want to know exactly where their food came from. But we’ve learned that the world has changed, and Christopher Ranch is going to change with it.”