Our Story
Red Tomato is a unique nonprofit organization based in Canton, MA. We market fresh fruit and vegetables from family farms in the northeast and southeast US to supermarkets and other customers throughout New England.

Red Tomato was founded in 1996 by Michael Rozyne, one of the founders of the fair trade company Equal Exchange. Red Tomato connects farmers with markets, and connects consumers with fresh fruits and vegetables, through marketing, logistics, distribution and education. Our products are grown on family farms, using ecological methods including organic, IPM, and biodynamic farming, and sold through supermarkets, grocery stores, coops, and restaurants.

Red Tomato is also committed to developing new market strategies, to constant learning, and to education through our community outreach and consulting work. We have been at the forefront of efforts to build a Domestic Fair Trade movement, applying principles of fair trade to support farmers in the US.

In 2006, we launched a unique new partnership with AgroFair and Equal Exchange, to bring fair trade bananas to the US: Oke USA. See www.okeusa.com for the exciting story.

Our Team
The success of Red Tomato to date can be explained by the people who work here and advise us. Take a look.

Our Partners
Red Tomato is a nonprofit funded through grants and donations from a variety of funding partners including foundations, state and federal government agencies, individuals, corporations and other like-minded organizations. Take a look.

Contact Us
Red Tomato
1033 Turnpike St.
Canton, MA 02021
(781) 575-8911
Get Directions
redtomato@redtomato.org

Our Team

 
Michael Rozyne paid his daughter, Shaya, 3 cents for every Colorado potato beetle she collected from their oversized garden. It worked! "It was her idea!" he swears, assuring us that her entrepreneurial spirit was not spoon fed. Despite the claim, Rozyne has been a marketer of small farm products for two decades. He was cofounder of the fair trade coffee company, Equal Exchange. He started Red Tomato in 1996. He is RT's Managing Director and acts as Local Farm Purchaser as well
George Riley is Red Tomato's Director of Development. He holds a CFRE professional certification in fundraising, and has worked over 16 years in fund development for various nonprofit organizations, including the Institute for Community Economics, Camphill Village and other human service organizations. A former biodynamic gardener, he commutes weekly from the Berkshires, where he enjoys the woods, cooking and cross-country skiing.
  Jon Wright is Red Tomato Finance Manager.
Betty MacKenzie is Red Tomato's Deputy Director. She also manages RT's program with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. She held positions as the grocery buyer, education director and marketing director at Harvest Cooperative in Boston, Mass. for many years and before that, was a VISTA worker in Roxbury, MA. Her other life revolves around her family including husband Jim, teenage daughter Sofia, son Jeff, Daughter-in-law Gigi, and granddaughter Vida. Much of their time is spent outdoors: cycling through apple country in the Nashoba Valley, and fending off groundhogs from the summer garden.
Angel Mendez' full name is Luis Angel Mendez. Angel came to Red Tomato in 2002 as warehouse manager, and says he was introduced to Red Tomato by Derrick Lane, the awesome former truck driver for RT. Angel held positions as Warehouse Manager for Boston Baby Superstores and T.V.I. for 7 years prior to joining Red Tomato. He is now RT Logistics Manager, handling transportation, trade logistics, bookkeeping and IT support. Angel says, "My journey here at Red Tomato has been an extreme learning experience. I have learned so much about agriculture and the politics that surround it, and my work here has also pushed me back to college where I am pursuing a degree in accounting. I love every aspect of the business. "
Diane Stalford was born to design and create. She was art director for Patagonia, the wilderness clothing company before moving to the east coast in 1993. "I am obsessed with the idea of creating. I love to cook, especially bake. The more complex the recipe, the more challenging it is." At Red Tomato Diane gets to design and create and focus on food all at once. She's our Art Director.
Kate Howell has been a leadership coach and consultant in the for-profit world for 17 years, working in eight countries and in numerous industries including high technology, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and insurance. Kate's Dad was a business visionary and her Mother a social rights activist, so Kate was pretty much destined to be a change-agent with a mission in mind. Kate serves as RT's Sales and Marketing Director, and Food Systems Development Director.
  Susan Futrell has been involved in food and sustainable agriculture endeavors for over 30 years. She spent 25 years in distribution, sales and marketing, most recently as Director of Marketing for Blooming Prairie Warehouse, a Midwest organic and natural foods wholesale cooperative. She’s a writer, and has an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She is Communications Director for Red Tomato, and divides her time between Massachusetts and Iowa, where she lives with her husband, Will, two cats, and a tiny garden.


Yannick Perrette and Anne Obelnicki are Red Tomato Interns in charge of the Community Outreach Program that brings apple tasting and education to Boston area elementary schools and grocery stores.
Jordan BarAm is Oke USA's Campaign Organizer.

Shannon Palmer, Diane Rast and Sue Futrell make up our web design and development team. Mary Meehan is RT's founding web master.

Board of Trustees and Key Advisors

Board of Trustees

Lynn Colangione was Red Tomato's Director of Development, a member of the management team, and was on RT's staff from 2000 to 2005. Lynn has a MS in Agriculture, Food & the Environment from the Tufts University School of Nutrition. Before RT, Lynn was a commodities trader, buying and selling food worldwide. Lynn's experience ranges from purchasing, sales and negotiating deals on a wide variety of food products, to managing transportation logistics.
Mike Guptill is (and has been for 14 years) the Sales and Marketing Manager for Gold Bell Arrow Farms, a wholesale produce company and a produce grower and repacker, located in the Chelsea Terminal Food Market outside Boston, MA. Mike lives on a farm in southern Maine which has been in his family for over 200 years. Mike runs the farm and also runs the Hackmatack Playhouse Theater out of one of his barns during the summer months. Mike has an MBA from Suffolk University and is adjunct faculty in Economics and Marketing at UNH.
Barney Hodges is President of Sunrise Orchard, Cornwall, Vermont, which he owns and manages with his wife Christiana and father Barney Hodges, Sr. Three generations of Hodges live and work on the farm. Barney has a B.S. in Geology from Middlebury College. After working in the international minerals industry and a stint as a competitive ski-racer, he returned to Sunrise, where he has spent the last decade-plus helping to turn it into a sustainable operation by integrating storage, handling, marketing, and distribution. Barney has been part of Red Tomato’s Eco Apple program since it began in 2003.
Betty MacKenzie is Red Tomato's Deputy Director. Betty was the grocery buyer, education director, and marketing director at Harvest Cooperatives in Boston, Mass. for many years before joining Red Tomato. (See RT Team for full bio.)
Bernadette Orr is Gulf Coast Emergency Program Manager at Oxfam America. With over 15 years experience in domestic and international development assistance, Bernadette has worked closely with a range of agricultural groups in the U.S. and Latin America on projects designed to enhance their income, increase access to markets, and change agricultural policy to support limited resource farmers. Bernadette was intimately involved in the production of a major research report by the Agricultural Policy Analysis Center: Rethinking U.S. Agricultural Policy: Changing Course to Secure Farmer Livelihoods Worldwide. Prior to her work with Oxfam America, Bernadette worked as an independent consultant on Latin American and women's issues, and served as a program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Michael Rozyne is Red Tomato's founder and managing director. He is a non-voting, ex-officio member of the board of trustees. Before starting Red Tomato, Rozyne co-founded Equal Exchange in 1985, a fair trade cooperative business that trades directly with small farmer coffee cooperatives in Latin America. Before Equal Exchange, Michael was the head buyer and marketing manager for Northeast Cooperatives in Brattleboro, Vermont, a consumer-owned natural foods wholesaler. (See RT Team for full bio.)
Dorothy Suput is founder and director of The Carrot Project, and the former Vice President of Development at the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF). At CLF, Dorothy was instrumental in diversifying and increasing financial support for the organization, quadrupling the endowment, building the various boards' capacity for fundraising, and developing a major gifts program. Prior to CLF, Dorothy was Executive Director of MassRecycle, a statewide coalition of government, businesses, individuals, and non-profits working to encourage recycling, source reduction, reuse, and buying recycled. Dorothy received her MA in Environmental Policy at Tufts University with a concentration in sustainable agriculture and non-profit management. Following graduate school, she was the Northeast Organizer for the Sustainable Agriculture Working Group's efforts around the 1995 Farm Bill.
Joel Yanowitz is the founder and President of The Cascade Group, Inc. For the past twenty years, he has worked with companies to design and implement targeted organizational change and transformation initiatives. Prior to establishing The Cascade Group, Mr. Yanowitz was a Vice President of Arthur D. Little, a global management consulting and technology development company. From 1985 to 1995, Mr. Yanowitz was the Managing Director of Innovation Associates, Inc., a fast-growing consulting and executive development firm that pioneered new approaches to organizational change and learning. Innovation Associates was acquired by Arthur D. Little in 1995.

Key Advisors

C.J. Kaplan is a self-employed writer and copywriter based in Needham, MA.

Glynn Lloyd is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of City Fresh Foods, a food service operation that daily provides over 2,000 Latin, Southern and Caribbean meals to elders, school students, and private events. City Fresh Foods has won such awards as Small Business Administration's Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and Boston Black and White Business Profile Award. City Fresh has been featured on National Public Radio, CNN and in Entrepreneur and Inc. Magazines.

Dawn Olcott has an MS in Human Nutrition and focuses her work on providing access and food systems development. Her experience spans twenty years and includes marketing, buying, and operations for food co-op retail and wholesale, and most recently food service. Aside from her work with Red Tomato she works as a Nutritionist in School Health in an urban school system. At home she enjoys cooking, gardening, and learning about tea with her husband, Keith - their two cats supervise all activities.

Jonathan Rosenthal is a long-time adviser to Red Tomato and is currently leading Red Tomato's exploration of a new joint venture tropical fruit company. For the past five years he has been running his own fair trade consulting company, Just Works Consulting, where he creates and manages projects to advance social justice issues in the food industry. His clients have included: CaféDirect, The Finance Alliance for Sustainable Trade, FoodLogic, ForesTrade, The International Institute for Sustainable Development, Just Us! Coffee, Oxfam America, Rainforest Alliance, SERRV, and Shared Interest (UK).

Beth Shepard is owner of Beth Shepard Communications, a public relations agency offering public relations and marketing services for small companies and individuals.