Tillie Lewis and the Tomato That Changed the Valley

She came to Stockton from Brooklyn with tomato seeds from Italy and an idea that the people she was about to talk to had never heard before.

Her name was Tillie Lewis, born Myrtle Ehrlich in nineteen oh one to Austrian Jewish immigrants in New York. She had been married, then divorced, then traveled to Italy to visit a tomato cannery in Naples. There she met Florindo del Gaizo, who grew and processed San Marzano plum tomatoes, a variety that produced dense, low-moisture flesh ideal for canning. The Italian tomato industry had built itself around this variety. California had never grown it.

Lewis convinced del Gaizo to back her. She settled in Stockton and went to work persuading local farmers to plant San Marzano seedlings on land that had been growing asparagus and grain. The pitch was specific: the delta soil and the valley's dry summer heat were close enough to the growing conditions around Naples that the tomato would do well here. She was right. By nineteen forty, San Joaquin County had become the leading tomato-producing county in the United States. She had built what was effectively a new industry out of a single variety, a handshake with an Italian investor, and a lot of persuasion.

Her company, Flotill Foods Corporation, became the largest supplier of Army C-Rations in the nation during the Second World War. She renamed the company Tillie Lewis Foods in nineteen fifty-one. By nineteen seventy-one, annual sales exceeded ninety million dollars. The Associated Press named her businesswoman of the year in nineteen fifty-one.

She sold the company in nineteen sixty-six and died in nineteen seventy-seven. A theater at San Joaquin Delta College bears her name. The tomatoes are still here.