The White Rose story can be traced back to 1886. Two brothers, Joseph and Sigel Seeman, left their Uncle David's company to pursue what they saw as the future of the grocery business. They predicted that the tradition of individual grocers picking up their own merchandise would fade, and a wholesaler who delivered would grow and prosper. Seeman Brothers and Doremus, the predecessor of today's White Rose, began with $4,500 and a dream. Like most new businesses, the venture began life with an identity crisis.

Brand names were virtually unheard of, and canned foods suffered from a rather poor reputation. However, the introduction of commercially canned foods helped further the brand name movement, and the brothers eventually came up with the name "White Rose" for their entire line, which consisted at the time of just three products: canned corn, tomatoes and peas.

It was tea that was to forever make White Rose a household name. By 1901, Seeman Brothers was well established as a wholesaler, but there was no single product that put the White Rose label ahead of the competition in a highly visible way. Black fermented tea was the chic drink at the turn of the century. Americans were traditionally coffee drinkers, so a black, strong tea was vital to win converts. Seeman Brothers found just that tea in a potent variety grown in Ceylon. Every conceivable promotion from flyers to attractive young girls dispensing free tea by the potful was used to establish White Rose Tea as a household name. To this day, most people otherwise unfamiliar with White Rose will, when asked what they associate with the brand name, unhesitatingly respond, "Tea!"

Today, White Rose is the largest independent wholesale food distributor in the New York City metropolitan area, which in turn is the largest retail food market in the United States. Owned and operated by Di Giorgio Corporation, White Rose Food serves supermarket chains, independent retailers and members of voluntary cooperatives, providing more than 18,000 food and nonfood products to more than 1,800 stores from Maryland to Connecticut. The highest concentration of these customers is in the five boroughs of New York City, Long Island and northern New Jersey.

In addition to carrying almost every national brand in the marketplace, the White Rose private label is highly successful and stands as a traditional favorite of many New York area households. During the 1990's, White Rose relocated all of its distribution facilities in order to better serve its retail customers. The Dairy Division was moved to Woodbridge, NJ while the Grocery and Frozen Food Divisions were relocated to new, state-of-the-art facilities in Carteret, NJ. In early 2000, the White Rose Data Center found a new home in Westbury, NY.

Today's wholesale grocery business is far different from that which the Seeman Brothers helped found more than one hundred years ago. White Rose Food does far more than sell groceries. White Rose supports virtually every aspect of retail grocery operations. Some of these support services include installation and configuration of POS scanning systems, group property insurance, printing of shelf labels, e-commerce and store design and configuration. White Rose has certainly come a long way from the $4,500 dream of Joseph and Sigel Seeman. Nevertheless, the company continues to seek ways to improve efficiency and expand its services. In this respect at least, the Seeman brothers would say we have not changed at all.