After working for Ring Bros. for 55 years, Ed Ring is retired. Sort of.

“I’m down to 40 hours a week,” he said. “I tell people that. They laugh, but it’s true. I come in four days, and I do what I like to do. It’s in the genes.”

That last statement is certainly true. The business was started 100 years ago by his uncle, Edmund Ring, who sold produce from a horse and wagon in Malden, Everett and Salem when he was still a teenager. Edmund’s brother Stephen Ring Sr. (Ed’s father) was only five or six when he began helping out, calling out “sweet oranges, quarter a dozen” to potential customers.

In 1945, when Stephen Sr. came back to the Boston area after serving in the army for five years, the brothers slowly built their business as a produce dealer on Boston’s North Shore.

In 1969, the brothers opened a store in Harwich, turning a pizza parlor into a produce store, which had to be rebuilt after it burned to the ground. The next generation – Ed and Stephen Jr. – helped build the business, eventually adding a wholesale component, in response to restaurant owners coming in to buy boxes of tomatoes and lettuce.

In the early ’90s, they opened a market in Cambridge. Ed modeled the interior layout after the street markets he and his wife, Susan, saw during a trip to Paris. When Stephen Jr. retired three years ago, the family closed the Cambridge market and focused on Cape Cod.

In 2001, Ed’s son Patrick played a key role in creating a new Dennis market, where they repurposed a building that had been used as a supermarket by Swift’s and Harney’s. They took a shell of a building and tweaked Patrick’s vision from the Cambridge store.

Patrick was fresh out of Bucknell University with an engineering degree. “That helped me with organization and just figuring out what to put where,” he said. “Once you’ve got the groundwork, then it slowly evolved over time based on what the customers want. There’s a million moving pieces. I’ve been in the business since I was a kid, but you learn as you go. I guess it took me two or three years to face the fact that I wasn’t going to go into engineering. But a lot of the things that I learned in school, I can apply here.”

Patrick is now the Vice President of Operations. The engineering mindset pays off, he said. “You have to be super organized. You have to be able to figure things out quickly. Every day is different. I’ll come in in the morning and say, this is going to be a really quiet day, not much going on, and then I am about ten steps backwards by the end of the day. Every single thing you touch is going to give you a result in the end. If we do these 20 technology changes, where are we going to be a year from now? Are we going to be doing more business, less business, have happier customers, happier employees? But that keeps it interesting.”

Today Ring Bros. continues to run wholesale and retail operations. The wholesale side distributes along the length of Cape Cod, moving 100,000 pounds of produce a day during the summer. The 10,000-square-foot warehouse allows the company to service 300 wholesale customers. The retail side is Ring Bros. Marketplace on Route 28 in Dennis, where they sell produce, groceries, dairy, flowers and housewares with a smoothie/juice bar in the middle of the space. Seven tenant partners have space along the perimeter: Montilio’s Bakery, Chatham Fish & Lobster, Dark Horse Beef & Deli, Spinners Pizza & Burritos, Nata’s Cake and Cookhouse, Hissho Sushi, and Portside Liquors. “The concept is that our customers can shop from the finest local vendors all in one place and can pay together at the front registers,” said Jillian Ring Campbell, one of Ed’s daughters.

“It’s basically a $40 million company right now that started from a peddling truck,” said Ed. “It’s a big little business or a little big business – one or the other.”

Ed’s official title with the company is President, but he said, “I’m the advisor and the wisdom guy. That’s what I would call myself.

“There’s something going on all the time. There’s never a down moment. You’re planning for this afternoon, you’re planning for next week, you’re planning for next month, you’re planning for next summer and you’re planning for two years from now. You always want to be proactive. That being said, it’s a fun business, buying new items and watching the trends. People’s tastes are constantly changing. What sells last summer doesn’t sell this summer. All of a sudden something new comes along.”

One trend has been consolidation in the wholesale industry. “There’s five or six big guys down here,” said Ed. “We’re the only small guy left. We’re the only guy that you can call up this afternoon and say, ‘Hey, can I come over and pick up a box of tomatoes? Can I get a delivery after the delivery time?’ We can send someone in a car with a dozen bunches of parsley. We want to be organized but our main advantage at this point is being the small game guy with so many personal relationships.”

On the retail side, he tries to make sure that shopping feels like an event, not a chore. “You feel good when you walk in here, and that’s what we always try to promote,” he said.

Stephen Sr. wasn’t the only family member to start working at an early age. Ed remembers accompanying his father after school when he was 5 or 6, selling produce from a truck in the ’50s and ’60s. His daughter, Kristin Cook, who is now special projects manager, worked in the Harwich store on weekends as a teenager and in college. “My dad wasn’t being hard on us, but he wanted to instill a good work ethic,” she said. “We’d be in at six on Sunday mornings, stuffing newspapers while our friends were sleeping.” Jillian recalls squeezing orange juice, wrapping produce and bagging ice during those Sunday shifts.

Rich Mulcahy, general manager for Ring Bros. Wholesale, started with the company 50 years ago when he was 13, working as a bag boy at the Harwich market. After he earned a degree in economics at the University of Maine, Stephen Ring Sr. asked him if he wanted to help build a wholesale business.

“I said, ‘Sure, let’s give it a shot,’ and it all started there,” Mulcahy said. “It was just kind of made up as we went along. None of us had ever done wholesale before. We’d dealt with people in the wholesale business, but we’d never done it ourselves.”

They focused on restaurants and nursing homes in Dennis, Harwich and Chatham. “We had one van and I used to come in in the morning, set up all the orders, and then I’d be out running around delivering them in afternoon,” he said.

The wholesale side now has 25 full-time employees year-round and about 45 during the summer. About 80 percent of the wholesale customers are independent restaurants. Local school systems provide a boost during the off season.

Years of experience pay off, Mulcahy said, but computerization is key to ensure that the warehouse has the right amount of produce on hand. “The computer systems now are amazing. It gives you a pretty good idea of what we’re going to sell next week.”

A recent addition to the wholesale staff is a former farmer who will focus on sourcing more local produce for both the wholesale and retail side. Mulcahy said the biggest change he’s seen in the business over the years is the products. “Twenty years ago, spring mix was a specialty item. Now it’s a commodity. There’s always something new. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen next, but it’s driven by the restaurants, it’s driven by the chefs. You have to stay in contact with them and you’ll be able to figure it out after a while.”

What’s the most important thing to keep a chef happy? “Quality is number one,” Mulcahy said. “They’ll say price isn’t important, but it is, but the most important thing is quality. They want good value for their money.”

Heading up marketing efforts for Ring Bros., Jillian is working on a rebranding effort. “After a hundred years, it was time to do something, and I have the resources to help with it.”

Jillian studied biology and psychology in a pre-med program at Union College. “Then I went, and I worked at a hospital and I was like, I don’t know if this is for me.” Instead, she worked as a producer and project manager at [Boston-based advertising agency] Hill Holiday, before joining the Ring Bros. team a few years ago. “There’s always been a gravitational pull,” she said. “I knew it’d be an easy transition.”

Her experiences in the advertising world transfer well to a family business, she said. “It’s funny how you don’t understand what you’re learning when you’re in something, but now I see the amount of stuff I learned from my bosses and my peers at Hill Holiday is insane. Having the knowledge of how to go about a problem is something that I couldn’t do without here. Being in all those meetings, I didn’t even realize I was a sponge with the strategy and the execution of things. Just being in those meetings for 20 years and listening has been really helpful. If you fail a couple times, you figure out what worked and what didn’t work, and then you go from there.”

Predicting what the next 100 years will bring would be foolhardy, but Patrick said envisioning where the company will be in five or ten years is an everyday conversation. “In the retail store, we’re progressively trying to grow by reaching out to more parts of the community and just hit every angle possible. I don’t know if it involves more stores on the Cape. That’s not really something we’re shooting for right now, because one store is a lot of work, but we can do more within this one building instead of spreading ourselves thin. On the wholesale side, we’re rebranding and trying to become more of a staple on the Cape for restaurants. There’s a lot of competition right now from off-Cape, so we’re trying to give this feeling that we’re on Cape Cod to service the Cape. And that’s why a lot of people buy from us.”

The company supports a number of local organizations each year, including Cape Kid Meals, Dennis-Yarmouth baseball and the Atlantic Shark Conservancy. “We want to be a part of the community,” said Jillian. “That’s what we pride ourselves on – being family-owned with a Cape Cod base. We’re from here, and we want to support local organizations and help out when we can.”

Like most employers, Patrick looks for people who are self-starters, but being passionate about food is another big plus. “We were talking about hiring more of a sales team for the South Shore. They might sell copiers or something and they might be good at it, but it’s not the same thing as selling food. We want to find somebody who’s a home chef or loves food.”

“If you can get people who share the same passion, then it’ll be easy for them to sell or easy for them to work in the store and enjoy it,” Jillian added.

Like a lot of people who grew up in a family business, Kristin said, “Working here was the last thing I wanted to do,” but she never fully stepped away from the business while earning a history degree at Hamilton College in upstate New York and studying community psychology at UMass Lowell.

Kristin’s current tasks include improving the onboarding process for employees and creating a new ERP (enterprise resource planning) app to make it easier for wholesale customers to place orders. “I love food and chefs and trying to make systems better,” she said. “It’s really fun working with Pat and Jill and my parents.” Kristin said her mother, Susan, is “the brain behind the whole office. She’s super smart and has her hands in everything, from the financials to ordering and customer service.”

With Ed Ring in his version of retirement – “It’s a hobby to me at this point,” he said – and his three children handling various responsibilities, the natural question is whether a fourth generation will someday run the family business.

Kristin’s 15-year-old son Max worked in the market last summer. “It was really fun seeing him in the produce department with my dad,” she said. “Pat’s daughter, Brielle, who is 10, always says she’s going to work here. So, there’s hope.”

“It’s a hard business,” said Ed. “It has to be in your blood.”

Bill O’Neill got his start in the communications industry delivering the Cape Cod Times on his bicycle. When he was a bit older, he was the lifestyle editor at the Times. As a freelancer, he writes about healthcare, pop music and other topics. He lives in Buzzards Bay and enjoys biking, hiking and kayaking.

Ring Bros.
485 Route 134, South Dennis
RingBrosMarketplace.com
RingBrosWholesale.com