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Lucas Benitez with John Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers DBA Sunripe Certified Brands as the CIW and Pacific agree to join forces to launch Fair Food Program in 2010
ProPublica on the Fair Food Program: “…The Fair Food Program’s protections currently extend to more than 20,000 farmworkers in nearly half of all states. It has led to workers getting paid more than $50 million in premiums. It is embraced by federal officials… [[link removed]] The participants include other large tomato growers in Florida, corn harvesters in Colorado and sweet potato farmers in North Carolina.”
Jon Esformes, CEO Pacific Tomato Growers and first major grower to join the FFP: “All of these things that are illegal were going on under the labor contractor system on every farm, including ours,” Esformes said. “I’m not sitting here with my head in the sand saying we were squeaky clean before. We knew there were problems. We wanted them fixed.”
Since its inception 15 years ago, the Fair Food Program has ushered in a new day for farmworkers across the United States, guaranteeing essential human rights protections against a raft of longstanding abuses — including wage theft, sexual harassment, retaliation, and modern-day slavery.
The program’s unprecedented success is a testament to the extraordinary passion and commitment of the Fair Food community — from farmworkers in Immokalee to students, people of faith, and everyday consumers across the country. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed their time, effort, and resources over the past 25 years to make that success possible.
In many ways, the extraordinary story of the Fair Food Program is the story of all who have stood with farmworkers year after year, demanding a life of freedom and dignity for the people who feed this country. Because of your support, tens of thousands of farmworkers are empowered to serve as frontline monitors of their own rights — and countless more will soon gain that power as the Fair Food Program expands nationwide and the broader Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model gains momentum around the world.
Today, with the holidays all but upon us, we are excited to share the latest installment in an ongoing investigative series by ProPublica , the nation’s leading investigative journalism outlet. While the first article in the series, published back in September, examined the horrifying conditions uncovered in Operation Blooming Onion [[link removed]] — a sprawling modern-day slavery case first brought to light by the CIW more than a decade ago — today’s installment focuses on how the Fair Food Program prevents such extreme abuses from happening in the first place, while creating a rare win-win for both workers and growers in the process.
Help Us Keep the Fair Food Program on the Road
Before sharing key excerpts from this important reporting, however, we want to pause to ask for your support. The advances in fundamental human rights on Fair Food Program farms highlighted in the latest ProPublica article would not be possible without it. And today, we need your help to keep our Worker-to-Worker Education Team on the road, leading essential rights education workshops on FFP farms from Florida to California.
Most large-scale farms in this country span endless acres of land divided into blocks of row crops and crisscrossed with sandy and muddy dirt roads — roads that can easily trap a regular vehicle and are difficult to escape without specialized equipment. As a general rule, busy tractor drivers are not eager to stop work to pull a stuck car from the dirt. Yet Fair Food Program education sessions — like the one pictured below — take place on the clock and on the farm, usually just before the day’s picking begins. The FFP Education Team always aims to get in and out of the fields with as little disruption to the hard work underway as possible.
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That is why the CIW Education Team relies on sturdy, off-road-capable 4×4 vehicles that can navigate deep sand, mud, and whatever else lies between the road and the fields. At present, however, the team is down to just one such vehicle serving the entire program. Two trusted older vehicles were recently lost to the wear and tear of 15 years of service, leaving the team with no choice but to repurpose less sturdy vehicles to get the job done.
What’s more, as the Fair Food Program continues to expand — a welcome and long-sought development, of course — we are facing a new and very real challenge: the need for a reliable fleet of off-road vehicles is only growing as we work to keep pace with surging demand for worker education and rights enforcement.
So, if you happen to own a 4×4 vehicle that may be getting on in years — an SUV you might be considering trading in, or an off-road vehicle you no longer use the way you once did — here is your chance to make a direct, tangible contribution to the program recognized by the USDA as the gold standard for human rights protection in U.S. agriculture!
By donating your vehicle to the CIW, you can help thousands of farmworkers learn about their rights and play their essential role as frontline defenders of those rights within the Fair Food Program. If you think you may have a vehicle that fits the bill, or if you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] .
And even if you don’t have a vehicle to donate, you can still help. Your financial contribution today will support the purchase and maintenance of the vehicles needed to keep the Fair Food Program running — and growing — in the fields where it matters most.
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Below are a few excerpts from ProPublica’s powerful reporting on how the Fair Food Program safeguards farmworker dignity while strengthening growers’ businesses. We will be sharing more insights from this series in the near future. To read today’s article in its entirety, click here [[link removed]] .
Farmworkers Are Frequently Exploited. But Few Farms Participate in a Program That Experts Say Could Prevent Abuse.
By Max Blau, Dec 16, 2025
… Pacific, with its 2,500 workers at farms and packing houses in four states, was able to show that it could adopt such reforms at scale without disrupting the profits it draws from over $90 million in annual revenue. Those reforms were possible in part through the company’s participation in the Fair Food Program, an initiative that launched in 2010 with the goal of preventing farmworkers from being harmed in the fields. By the end of Pacific’s first year in the program, other major tomato growers followed its lead, in hopes of not losing customers because of their labor practices…
Over the next decade and a half, the program would help protect the rights of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. It would also resolve thousands of the workers’ complaints. But its protections would only reach a tiny fraction of the country’s farms…
At first, Esformes [CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers] was chiefly concerned with doing right by his workers. But after a few seasons there were unexpected benefits.
At a time when many farmers haven’t been able to find enough workers, Pacific largely stopped experiencing labor shortages. Over time, as Esformes’ fields became safer and the number of injuries declined, so did the risks of workers’ compensation claims. The programs’ mandatory rest breaks — 10 minutes every two hours during the summer — did not lessen productivity. Those breaks ended up having the opposite effect: The workers had more energy to pick faster, compared to when they were getting exhausted and less efficient at the end of each day.
When workers returned home, they chatted about life on Esformes’ farms. The pickers wanted to come back the next season. Before long, their friends and family members back home started asking for jobs too.
What was good for his workers ended up being good for his business… ( read the full ProPublica article here [[link removed]] ).
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Coalition of Immokalee Workers
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