It was the mid-1970s, and like many other young transplanted Midwesterners, the 20-something Earl Herrick was simply enjoying life in San Francisco. He grew up in Ohio but moved west to try something different.

"I didn't have a college education but I always worked and never had trouble finding a job," Herrick recalled. "At that time I was living in the Richmond District and worked in a restaurant in the Sunset (District). I would walk to work every day through the Golden Gate Park. Every day I'd pass by a fruit truck and often buy a piece a fruit and talk to the guy running it. It was the fall of '75 and he told me that in the spring, he'd need some help and he would hire me."Earl Herrick's Interview with CBS news in 2010.

At the time, Herrick said he was not a "foodie" in any way, shape or form. "We didn't even have a garden back at home. At that time I had never eaten an artichoke or an avocado."

The fruit truck was owned by an entrepreneur with other food businesses, and true to his word the operator and the owner hired Herrick in the spring of 1976 to help out. Eventually, he staffed that truck full time.

"I was very fortunate," Herrick said. "The guy running the truck had great passion for food and life, and the owner had equal passion."

For the next four years, Herrick ran that fruit truck and developed his own passion for food and a healthy lifestyle. "It was a great experience," he said. "There was a great diversity of people that would come by every day."

He said the neighborhood had many different ethnicities, including a large Asian population that would often shop the food truck two or three times a day. During this period, Herrick became more conscious of his diet, read food labels continuously and became a vegetarian.

By 1980, the food truck owner had established a natural food store across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, and he offered Herrick a job. For the next eight years, Herrick's talents evolved, as did the natural foods store.

By the mid-1980s, there were three stores and Herrick was "the produce guy."

The natural foods store specialized in organic produce, and Herrick became somewhat of an expert on that produce sector. In 1988 an opportunity presented itself and he opened Earl's Organic Produce on the San Francisco Market in one small stall.

He said the organic produce sector in the San Francisco Bay area was a "tight-knit community and I knew everyone. I didn't have a big business plan. In fact, when I hired the first guy I told him I didn't know if it would be a full-time job."

Twenty-five years later, Earl's Organic Produce has 65 employees, eight trucks delivering all over the Bay Area and it has just expanded again, moving to a 30,000-square-foot space on the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market.

In fact, the firm has taken over the space previously occupied by Whole Foods, which has moved to a new off-market distribution facility.

Though Earl's Organic Produce has been a mainstay on the market for many years now, Herrick said it took a long time for him to feel like he had "made it," and that the business was truly a sustainable operation.

In the beginning he did it all, from buying and selling to loading and delivery. Today, he has many employees to carry on the day-to-day operations and he sees himself more as a mentor to the younger employees. Yet he is still very much involved, "and I have held on to the 'buyer of fruit' title. I still buy three or four items myself."

However in 2013 he did expand the department and brought on another fruit buyer to allow himself a little more free time.

"I have lots of places to put my energy," he said. "We now sell a fresh salsa, we have moved to the new facility and we have a web site. I am still here every day, but I do have a very good group of people with at least a half dozen that have been with me for 12 years or more."

Earl's has some customers across the country, but Herrick considers the operation a local, regional wholesaler mostly serving the produce community within about a 100-mile radius.

"We do ship north to Oregon," he said, "but most of our customers are in that curve that includes Santa Cruz (to the south) and Sacramento (to the east)."

One of the most important aspects of the new space that Earl's is calling home is the addition of three banana ripening rooms. It is now the only wholesaler in Northern California that can offer its own organic ripening program.

"A banana program is the cornerstone of a good wholesale distribution operation," Sales Manager Patrick Stewart told The Produce News. "It's great when you can control the color of the bananas you can deliver on a daily basis."

Previously, Earl's has worked with an off-site banana wholesaler that gassed the bananas until they reached breaking stage and then brought them to the market for further ripening and delivery to their customers.

Stewart said that it was much better to control the process from ocean liner to the customer's dock. Earl's can now bring in more straight banana shipments into the nearby Oakland port. He said the three banana rooms each have 20-pallet capacity and each room can be split in half, creating six separate 10-pallet rooms for ripening purposes. Bananas can now be at literally at every stage of ripeness on a daily basis.

"We are delivering our first seven pallets today," he said in late December.

As he looks back at his career and his opportunities, Herrick believes it was a case of being at the right place at the right time. San Francisco, with its progressive nature, is the perfect place to launch an organic produce company, he believes. In the early years, even as his business was doing well, Herrick said a trip around the United States would find many communities without any organic produce. He said the growth of Whole Foods illustrates how that has changed so much in the past 25 years.

"From Boise to Ann Arbor (MI) to Boulder, Colorado, there are organic operations everywhere," he said.

However, he is not totally happy with the direction organic produce is headed. With the advent of government regulations and rules a decade ago has come the constant tweaking and expanding of the definition of organic produce and foods, he said. As the large grower-shippers get involved, he said there is pressure to make the growing of organic fruits and vegetables easier and easier. Herrick is starting to see a two-tier system in the marketplace with some touting a stricter standard.

Herrick said the farming of organic produce seems to be something that is better accomplished on a small scale and he hates to see a trend where the small guy gets shut out by the big guys. "Sometimes less is more," he said.

While that may be true, Earl's Organic Produce has also proven over the past 25 years that "more" is pretty good too.