David Allen started Western Boxed Meat in NE Portland in 1983. His son, David Jr. handled sales and his brother-in-law, John, ran the dock. Harvest Meat Company also was a family business founded in 1989 in Marshalltown, Iowa. The Leavy family soon had offices in Phoenix and San Diego. The strategy for both companies was simple: provide independent food companies that did not have the scale to be self-distributors, the opportunity for access to national and regional brands/products that included the all-important protein categories of beef, pork, poultry, and seafood. While independent food distribution was not new, both companies launched a strategy that was developed to provide a better way for customers to acquire product. Simply put, the strategy focus was to provide a wide selection of protein items that included solutions to fit any demographic with the brands and products that they demanded. Coupled with high fill rates and on-time delivery, access to a wide selection of brands and products was right on target and immediately embraced by customers in Phoenix and San Diego. Harvest acquired Western Boxed Meat in 1998.

In March 2017, Harvest Food Distributors merged with Sherwood Food Distributors, another family-run business based in Detroit, to form an unprecedented national partnership. With coverage from coast-to-coast, Harvest Sherwood Food Distributors can now better serve protein and perishable food producers, and independent retail and foodservice customers. The 800 strong Harvest Sherwood Family is very proud of the company’s 10 Distribution Centers supported by 12 sales offices across the United States servicing over 6,000 customers in the retail, foodservice, distribution, manufacturing, and further processing segments.

An integral part of this success is the founder’s commitment to hiring and developing quality people, people that understand our business and more importantly our customer’s businesses. This highly experienced team goes to great lengths to service our customers at a very high level. Harvest Members are the very heart of our business and are represented by professional sales staff, accounting, IT, as well as our warehouse and transportation departments. Armed and supported by state-of-the-art technologies in order processing, inventory control, truck tracking, market information, product handling, and UPC bar-code scanning, the company has evolved into a highly efficient full line marketer and distributor of perishable food products that now includes the fast-growing dairy, deli, and bakery categories.