Watercress giant B&W operates in Fellsmere (2025)

By Siobhan Fitzpatrick Austin

It’s a little known fact that the biggest manufacturer of watercress in the United States is located in Fellsmere.

Founded in 1870, B&W is a family-run business that values its privacy and does not, nor ever has, offered interviews to the media. But according to its website, the powers-that-be attribute the company’s success to “a single premise of quality.”

B&W employs innovative business practices to ensure that quality. To this end, the watercress, and more recently roquette baby arugula, is grown locally from November through May. During the hotter months in Florida, the vegetable growing operation is moved to West Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama. Not only does this make smart business sense because it provides an ample supply of fresh watercress year-round, but it is environmentally friendly, as it allows the Florida land to lay fallow and regenerate naturally.

Commitment to the environment has been a hallmark of B&W. According to its website, B&W is certified 100 percent organic by both the United States Department of Agriculture and the European Union’s very strict organic growing standards. Its farms in Florida use more than 20 miles of canals, moving water through a gravity flow water system through and around farms “like a protective moat,” according to www.bwgrowers.com, to mimic natural wetlands that watercress flourish in.

And, each watercress bed and canal are excavated in such a way to eliminate runoff and erosion, providing the gravity flow system that saves water and conserves energy. What’s more, for every canal they build, they build two miles of roadways with every foot connected with high-powered electricity and underground utilities, according to the company’s website.

B&W was founded five generations ago by Richard Soltan and Richard Salmon Baker in New Jersey and appropriately named Soltan & Baker. In 1963, Baker’s great great grandniece, Patricia, married yet another Richard, Richard Burgoon, who eventually bought the business from his father-in-law in 1969 and merged with Donald E. Weaver. The new partners soon changed the name to B&W Quality Growers.

In 1990, Weaver retired and sold his share of the business to Burgoon, who still owns it. He oversees the family-run business with the help of his son, Steven, who is the company’s sales director, his nephew, Robert, vice president of operations, and the newest members of the family, his sons-in-law Andy Brown, vicep president of marketing, and Alan Temple, company president. In 1995, B&W moved its headquarters to Fellsmere.

Today, B&W has approximately 230 full-time employees, including administrative, packinghouse and harvesting staffs, in addition to about 20 part-time workers. Many of the employees are like family and have been with the company for more than 15 years, and still others for as long as 50 years. This kind of loyalty is probably due to the company’s generous benefits package, which includes year-round housing in both Florida and on their farms in other states, health insurance, holiday pay and college or trade school education supplements for employees’ children. In addition, since B&W’s employees include recent immigrants, the company converted its workforce to a H2-A program of workers with legal work visas.

The past few years, watercress has undergone a saerious public relations campaign, thanks to lifestyle magazines and websites, which hail the green vegetable for its tart, fresh taste, a great add to any salad or sandwich. It is also touted as an anti-cancer super food by the way it significantly reduces DNA damage to blood cells believed to be a key trigger in malignant tumors according to several experts including heart surgeon and TV personality, Dr. Oz. And, in a 2007 study about watercress conducted by the University of Ulster in Ireland that appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, watercress also increases the ability of cells to resist additional DNA caused by free radicals.

So what are the magical ingredients that make up this super food? Vitamins A, C, and K, and iron, iodine, calcium and folic acid.

With so much hype about this uber healthy food, it seems an auspicious time to invest in B&W. But can you? When the-powers-that-be were asked, they simply said, “No comment.”