Agriculture sales expert Curt Granger joins Seattle-based startup to lead company’s grape sales
SEATTLE, Wash. – December 13, 2017 – Phytelligence, a leading agricultural biotechnology company that is revolutionizing food crops, today announced the addition of Curt Granger to its team as vice president of global sales for the grapes segment. Granger will lead the company’s pursuit of new customers for rootstock, whole plant, genetic analysis and repository services in the grapes and wine agricultural market to fuel additional growth.
Granger will collaborate with Phytelligence’s customer service, accounting and marketing teams to ensure the company delivers high-quality plants and services to its customers. As the vice president of global sales for grapes, Granger will provide grape growers with genetically confirmed, true-to-type grape rootstock and self-rooted plant material.
“Curt’s strategic thinking and expertise in greenhouse, bio-agriculture and crop innovation align well with our objectives to deliver genetically confirmed, virus-free plants to growers,” said Ken Hunt, CEO of Phytelligence. “His deep knowledge of the challenges and opportunities faced by growers will further expand our efforts to address the rootstock bottleneck that has been plaguing the industry for the past several decades.”
Granger began his career as assistant to the vineyards manager at Buena Vista Winery in the Carneros wine grape growing region in California. He then moved to Bien Nacido and French Camp Vineyards where he was Northern California’s wine grape, bulk wine sales manager placing more than 5,000 tons of grapes in long-term contracts with North Coast wineries.
After eight years as director of marketing for California Kiwifruit Commission, he transitioned to executive vice president of marketing for Chilean Fresh Fruit Association, where the marketing activities he directed supported the increase of retail table grape sales to $1.7 billion from 1997 to 2004. He also held a vice president of marketing role with premium tree fruit brand Ripe ‘N Ready, and was most recently developing markets for biopesticides nationally and on the West Coast.
“I am thrilled to be joining the Phytelligence team,” said Granger. “The company’s commitment to delivering superior quality results is unparalleled. They have a validated solution and an impressive growth trajectory that I am excited to help drive forward.”
About Phytelligence
Phytelligence is an agricultural biotechnology company that is revolutionizing the way food crops are grown. Utilizing its proprietary growing techniques to provide superior quality crops, Phytelligence enables higher grower profit by increasing speed to harvest and reducing input costs. Phytelligence provides additional value to food crop growers and plant breeders through the application of advanced genetics enabling guaranteed delivery of accurate plants, disease screening, plant repository services, securing of intellectual property, and the ability to co-develop new varieties of food crops. The company has a growing pipeline of biological and compound solutions aimed at improving returns throughout the food crop value chain. Phytelligence was founded by Dr. Amit Dhingra in 2012 out of his Horticulture Genomics and Biotechnology Research laboratory at Washington State University and is headquartered in Seattle with offices in Pullman, Wash. and Portland, Ore. Learn more at www.phytelligence.com.
