By Emily Hamann – Staff Writer, Sacramento Business Journal
Feb 21, 2020, 5:32pm EST

Dale Darling has always been interested in seeing the world. Growing up on a dairy farm in Michigan, his family hosted foreign exchange students and took trips to see extended family in Europe.

Today, he’s the founder and president of Summit Premium Tree Nuts, an Orangevale-based brokerage that buys and sells nuts all over the world.

In 2008, Darling left Blue Diamond Growers to start his company, which today has 26 employees and does $600 million in sales per year.

“My family’s been blessed,” he said. “And we’re very, very fortunate.”

Darling has agriculture in his blood. On the farm in Michigan, his family had milked cows for 160 years.

In college Darling studied animal science, economics and international trade and finance. That’s where he decided he wanted to stay in agriculture, but work around the world.

“I realized the world’s not that big of a place and I just wanted to see more of it,” Darling said. “I just had a lot of energy.”

After college he got a job at the dairy genetics company World Wide Sires Ltd. in Visalia. He traveled six to eight months every year. Darling made 40 trips to southern Africa, and saw the fall of the Soviet Union.

The business trips also helped him on a major personal accomplishment — climbing the tallest mountain on every continent.

“Back when I was younger and dumber, I used to have a hobby called mountain climbing,” Darling said.

After he moved to Visalia, he started going on hiking trips in the Sierra mountains with a friend. Then he climbed Mount Shasta.

“I really enjoyed the snow climbing, and using the crampons and ice ax,” he said. Each year he tried to climb something bigger than the previous year. And he was traveling so much, he could always find a new mountain to climb. One year he used his vacation time to climb Mount Kenya. The next year he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

“I was always over there in Russia so the next year I did Elbrus,” he said.

Then he read the book “Seven Summits," which chronicles mountaineers Frank Wells' and Dick Bass' journey climbing the tallest mountains on each continent.

“It gave me a challenge,” Darling said. “It gave me something to train for, to push myself physically and mentally.”

He climbed Mount Everest in 2004. He finished the journey with the smallest mountain of the seven, Mount Kosciuszko in Australia.

By the time he climbed Mount Everest, he had left his job at World Wide Sires. Over time, the travel had worn on him.

“It gets a little tiring, living out of your suitcase for 11 years,” he said.

Looking for a job with less travel, he transitioned to Blue Diamond Growers in 2000. At the Sacramento-based growers' cooperative, he only had to travel two months out of the year.

He did that for eight years, before deciding to start his own company.

“I just felt there was a good opportunity within the almond industry at the time,” he said.

The decades-long rise in new California almond orchards was in full swing. Almonds continue to get more popular as people around the world try to eat healthier. In the West, it’s been consumers switching to more plant-based diets, and using almond products to replace gluten and dairy.

“The almond milk and almond butter segment of the industry has grown dramatically and that now accounts for almost 18% of our supply that we produce goes into milk, butter type components,” he said.

As demand for almonds rose, more growers were planting almonds, and more were trying to process and sell them on their own, instead of joining a co-op.

“I had excellent relations with many of the folks overseas, and I just thought also that many of the larger growers here in the valley were starting to turn into their own processor packers, but they had limited international experience,” he said. “So I thought I could assist both sides.”

Ben Hudelson runs a 1,200-acre almond farm in Hughson, near Modesto, and processes 30 million pounds of almonds a year from his orchard and 350 other farms in the state.

He started working with Darling and Summit in 2010.

“We were just looking for new avenues to market more nuts,” and had heard good things about Darling, Hudelson said. “Once we got connected with him he seemed like an upfront guy. He’s gotten us into new markets and pushed our brand.”

Hudelson has worked with him ever since, and said that Darling has helped their almonds break into new countries.

“He’s just a great guy to work with and a great company to work with,” Hudelson said.

Summit has also expanded into walnuts, pistachios, hazelnuts and pecans.

Darling said that Summit benefits from being a private company as opposed to a cooperative like Blue Diamond. In the early 20th century, it was common for farmers to form co-ops to pool their resources to process and market their product. In a cooperative, each grower owns a little piece of the company, and a share of the profits.

Darling's company is a traditional for-profit company. He buys nuts directly from processors and growers and sells them to buyers.

“One of your pros is you’re more nimble, you can act quickly, you can make quick decisions,” Darling said. “So it’s very, very good. Less politics.”

Summit Premium Tree Nuts has grown to the second-largest exporter of almonds in the world, with accounts in 65 countries, he said.

Darling still travels two months a year. He’s been to 94 countries, so far.

“I hope in the next two to three years to make it 100 countries. That’s my next small target goal,” he said. “You’ve got to have things like that to kind of keep things going.”

The Essentials

Dale Darling

Education: Bachelor's degree in animal science and master's degree in economics, Michigan State University

Most difficult mountain to climb: "Mentally — Mount Everest. Physically — Denali."

Which mountain you never want to climb again: "Vinson Massif, in Antarctica. The first week, the negative 40 degree temperatures plus 25-mile-an-hour winds made the temperature, with windchill, feel like it was 100 degrees below freezing. Then it warmed up to a balmy minus 32 degrees. You don’t see any animals. You don’t see any birds, you don’t see any bugs. You see nothing.”

Languages spoken: English, German, Spanish