The Produce Aisle Needed a Marketing Department

An artichoke has a marketing problem. It does not explain itself. It sits in the produce aisle looking armored, asking a hurried shopper to perform kitchen archaeology. A clementine is easier, but it has cousins that look almost exactly like it. A Medjool date may be delicious, yet first it must survive the question: what do I do with this? Packaged goods arrive with instructions, mascots and media budgets. Fresh produce mostly arrives with a sticker.

This is the peculiar gap DMA Solutions has occupied since 2004. The McKinney, Texas agency builds brands, websites, social programs, public-relations campaigns and inbound systems. That list sounds like any competent full-service shop. The difference is what the team already knows before the first meeting: the seasonality, the retailer conversation, the trade-show calendar, the thin budgets and the distance between a grower's story and a shopper's dinner.

Founder Dan'l Mackey Almy learned that distance by selling produce for roughly a decade. She did not begin with an agency and hunt for a niche. She began inside the niche and noticed that an industry capable of moving astonishing quantities of food was often hesitant to market it. The first failure, in other words, was not a botched campaign. It was a category-wide habit: treating produce as a commodity and expecting taste, health and wholesaler relationships to do all the talking.

The lesson hiding inside the fruit sticker

DMA's clients include recognizable names and highly specific ones: Cuties citrus, Duda Farm Fresh Foods and its Dandy brand, Good Foods, Natural Delights, Ocean Mist Farms, Summer Citrus from South Africa, California Giant Berry Farms and Super Starr. Some need to be understood by retail buyers. Some need affection from shoppers. Most need both.

That dual audience shapes the work. For Cuties, DMA says it became an extension of the marketing team across annual planning, creative, web development, packaging, social and the execution surrounding a Disney partnership. For Duda, it supported the corporate grower story and shopper marketing for Dandy at the same time. For Ocean Mist Farms, the obstacle was not awareness alone. Plenty of people recognize an artichoke. They may simply be intimidated by preparing one. The agency paired brand work with educational content and a system for gathering shopper data.

“We believe in the good of food that is grown.”DMA Solutions

This is category fluency made practical. A generalist can make an artichoke beautiful. A specialist asks whether beauty solves the right problem. If the shopper is afraid of cooking it, the useful creative may be a recipe page, a preparation video or a promotion that turns uncertainty into a small adventure.

Four billion reasons to distrust overnight success

The agency's most revealing case study began with Natural Delights Medjool dates and ended with a Yahoo placement that DMA described as worth four billion impressions. The number is spectacular. The mechanism was stubbornly ordinary.

Natural Delights had paid two food bloggers to create recipes, posts and event content beginning in 2013. A writer followed those advocates, then followed the brand across social channels. Years later, during Heart Health Month in 2016, the company worked with a registered dietitian and created a heart-shaped snack image. The idea moved through the website, email, social media and PR. The writer saw it, covered it, and Yahoo picked up the story.

The copyable part is not “make a heart out of snacks.” It is to make every channel support the same idea and to keep useful relationships alive before a news moment arrives. DMA calls this a five-course meal rather than a salad bar. The phrase is a little corny, which feels appropriate. It also makes the point: disconnected tactics do not become a strategy merely because they share a spreadsheet.

An agency shaped like an internal team

DMA sells projects and ongoing retainers, with each program scoped around the client's goals and budget. It publishes no rate card. The pitch is access to an “instant team” instead of separate specialists or a long internal hiring process. The agency can define a brand, build its website, run public relations, plan social content, manage paid media, automate email, equip a trade-show booth and report what happened.

That breadth is only persuasive because the niche supplies a point of view. Freshness, quality and sustainability have become table stakes in produce messaging. DMA president Megan Zweig argued in 2026 that trust is becoming the stronger promise. Buyers face pricing pressure and volatile supply. Shoppers face inflation and vague claims. In that setting, a brand is useful when it reduces uncertainty - when packaging, sales material and public statements all make the same believable case.

The model is best suited to a company with an actual commercial objective, a willingness to share access and enough patience to build recognition. It is less convincing for a founder who wants one post to “go viral,” for a brand unwilling to define a target customer, or for a team that measures social activity without connecting it to sales, leads or trust. Category expertise shortens the learning curve. It does not repeal the calendar.

Helpful first, then artificial intelligence

The most telling thing about DMA's culture may be the amount of advice it gives away. The Core, its marketing publication, had more than 2,000 weekly subscribers by the company's 20th anniversary. Founder Almy and president Megan Zweig co-host the Self Smarter podcast about leadership and self-awareness. The internal vocabulary is earnest and explicit: seek the why, take accountability, be self-aware, say “yes, and,” be helpful first.

That habit has now produced dmAI Learning, an education and consulting initiative for fresh-produce professionals. This is less of a departure than it sounds. DMA helped the industry through earlier waves of websites, social media, email and mobile design. Artificial intelligence is simply the new intimidating object in the aisle. The company is again betting that context beats novelty: teach a produce professional where AI saves time, where accuracy matters and how to keep a distinctive brand voice.

There is an easy lesson here for any small company, even one that has never packed a clementine. Do not confuse a narrow market with a small idea. Learn one customer's world deeply enough that your service stops feeling imported. Turn recurring questions into free, useful media. Build one message across channels. Measure what the work does. And when the industry changes, translate the change in its own language.

The produce aisle did not need louder adjectives. It needed somebody who understood why “fresh” had become invisible. DMA Solutions built a business by noticing that the simplest products can have the most complicated stories.