The pistachio is a difficult thing to market. Its virtues are mostly concealed. It arrives in a shell, comes from an operation few shoppers will visit, and sits on a shelf beside other pistachios that look remarkably similar. Keenan Farms had a legacy - it had operated longer than any other California pistachio processor, according to Root Creative Marketing’s account of the work - but a legacy is not the same as a modern buying reason. The interesting question was how to get the former into the latter.
Root’s answer was not one clever advertisement. It was a sequence: sharpen the message, produce better photographs and video, manage social channels, create design material, pursue public relations, and point more people toward Keenan’s Amazon store. Root reports that purchases through that store rose 25 percent and social followers increased 63 percent during the engagement. Those are the agency’s figures, not audited results. But they reveal its operating theory. A story is useful only when it changes what somebody does next.
This distinction explains why Root, founded in 2020 by Stephanie Steelman and Sam Justice, makes sense in Fresno. The city sits in the center of an economy where enormous value is produced by businesses whose public language can be stubbornly generic. Growers, processors, nutrition companies, farm lenders and equipment suppliers know precisely how their work differs. The customer looking at a booth, a feed or a homepage may not.
The hidden product is confidence
Steelman runs business development and helps set marketing strategy; Justice leads the creative side. Around them is a team that covers accounts, project management, photography, video, graphic design, UX/UI, web development, sales and editorial work. That breadth is not an aesthetic flourish. Their clients often do not have a cleanly isolated “website problem” or “social problem.” They have a confidence problem. The operation may be excellent, but the buyer encounters an old logo, an awkward site and a sales sheet from three harvests ago.
Consider TEP, a family-owned maker of soil amendments and plant-nutrition products. Root describes the starting point bluntly: outdated branding and weak awareness. The sales team needed a professional image and collateral that could help move products in person and online. Root established guidelines, redesigned the logo, modernized the website and built an audience around the people most likely to care - growers and independent pest-control advisers. The agency says the combined follower increase across Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn was 726 percent.
The numbers vary in quality and comparability. A follower is not a purchase. A website view is not a contract. A percentage can look heroic when the starting number is small - TEP’s LinkedIn audience began at 13. Still, the pattern is more instructive than any single figure. Root starts with whatever is preventing a business from being understood, repairs the system around it, then watches for evidence of movement.
What failed first? The handshake
The agency’s founding year is a clue. In 2020, ordinary B2B habits broke all at once. Sanger Fence could no longer rely on meetings and visits. Harris Family Enterprises, a farming group with international buyers, could not bring customers through its operations in the usual way. The first failure was not the product. It was the route by which trust traveled.
For Harris, Root created a modern website and a video-led “stay connected” concept. More than 75 episodes were produced and distributed globally. Root reports a 55.2 percent increase in YouTube views and a 95.7 percent rise in website views. The change of mind here was forced but durable: if buyers could not come to the operation, the operation had to go to the buyers.
For Sanger Fence, the solution was more mischievous. Root refreshed the identity, used social platforms to identify decision makers, then sent those people physical mail. The agency reports a 7,500 percent return on the mailer. Digital targeting made an old medium precise. The case is a small rebuke to channel snobbery. “Modern marketing” does not mean selecting the newest delivery system. It means selecting the delivery system the intended person will notice.
A grape with a speaking part
Root’s newer work shows the same logic with more play. For DLJ Produce’s Razzle Dazzle Grapes, the agency created brand characters. This could have become pure whimsy - fruit with faces, content calendar filled, everyone goes home. Instead, Root framed the characters as a way to escape a category in which most brands say some version of “buy our grapes.” A character gives the product a repeatable behavior and voice. It lets the brand accumulate memory between harvest pictures.
The agency applied a related idea to Visalia Lifestyle, a print magazine whose website had to feel as alive as the publication. Root made the experience scroll-driven and visual-first. The site was not designed as a directory pointing back to print. It was designed as the magazine extended into a different set of gestures. Elsewhere, a studio and location shoot for Stewart & Jasper Orchards treated imagery as an early quality signal - the judgment a buyer makes before tasting anything.
That observation, from Root’s public writing, is the agency’s most portable insight. The customer does not experience your messaging as an internal celebration of your cleverness. The customer experiences it as evidence for or against a decision. In agriculture, where seasons are unforgiving and purchasing mistakes can be expensive, credibility is not mood. It is risk reduction.
The part another company can copy
Begin with the sales obstacle, not the content format. Ask where confidence leaks away. Is the website making an advanced operation look improvised? Is a sales representative explaining the same complicated idea from scratch in every meeting? Does the visual material signal commodity when the product is premium? Then build the smallest coherent system that closes those gaps: a clear position, a recognizable identity, proof from the operation, and collateral that travels.
Next, match the channel to the decision. A narrow list of commercial buyers may justify a beautifully timed mailer. International customers who cannot tour a facility may need a sustained video series. Produce shoppers may remember a character before they remember a varietal claim. The method works when the company possesses a real operational advantage and grants the creative team access to it. It is less likely to work when leadership wants cosmetic novelty, withholds expertise, or expects weak distribution to be rescued by prettier assets.
Root does not publish a rate card. One Fresno Unified purchase-order listing records a $6,565 transaction with the agency, but the scope is not identified. For buyers, that makes the useful budgeting unit the engagement - identity, site, campaign or ongoing program - rather than an invented hourly benchmark.
Root’s business model follows from this breadth. It is a privately held agency selling projects and ongoing relationships, with clients ranging from local organizations to businesses that sell across the country and overseas. Its alternatives are obvious: a large generalist agency, a specialized farm-marketing shop, several freelancers, or an internal team. Root’s pitch is coordination. The strategist, photographer, designer, developer and account lead can work from the same account of what the buyer needs to believe.
There is a nice irony in an agency named Root doing its best work on translation. Roots are invisible. They perform the indispensable part below the surface, while the visible thing gets admired. Much of Root’s client base has the same predicament. The complicated, valuable work is already happening. The agency’s job is to bring just enough of it above ground.