ABOUT OUR HONOREE
Bob Garibaldi
For Bob Garibaldi, lifelong career success comes down to enjoying his work and maintaining a strong team mindset. Garibaldi has dedicated his career to the wholesale grocery industry, climbing the ranks and remaining with the same couple of companies through mergers and acquisitions. Now he is President of the Pacific Division of United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), a wholesale food distributor that has grown into what it is today through a handful of mergers.
“Learning how to work and taking pride in what you do every single day, that’s a great trait to learn as a young person,” Garibaldi says. “To this day I think it’s the single most important thing that has ever happened to me.”
For the last four years, Garibaldi, who resides in Northern California with his wife Rachelle of 30 years, has been with UNFI, and prior to that he worked for SUPERVALU and Unified Grocers for over three decades.
Garibaldi continued to build on those lessons and kept that advice close to heart as he entered college at UCLA, where he attended school on a football scholarship to play wide receiver. He played in three Rose Bowls, a Fiesta Bowl and a Holiday Bowl.
WORK ETHIC AT AN EARLY AGE
He says his grandfather always told him that if he worked hard and went to get an education, he could get anywhere he wanted to go.
Before trying his hand at a job in the grocery space, Garibaldi began his career after college with his dad’s business—a Coors distributorship where Garibaldi worked for two years. During that time, he realized he wanted to sharpen his skills outside the walls of the family operation. “I left to learn, go outside and work for a co-op, Certified Grocers, and bring some experience back to the family business,” Garibaldi says. “But I enjoyed it so much that I didn’t want to leave. The career path was happening fast on the Certified Grocers side, so I just decided to stay.” Garibaldi credits his work ethic to his background in family business. Even before he worked in the beer business, he got his feet wet at the young age of eight in the food and candy distribution business that his grandfather owned.
“I left to learn, go outside and work for a co-op, Certified Grocers, and bring some experience back to the family business,” Garibaldi says. “But I enjoyed it so much that I didn’t want to leave.”
50 | CAL I FOR N I A G RO C E R
Can you spot Bob during one of his many appearances at the Rose Bowl?
“What I learned in athletics and competing every single day just set me up for what was to come in the real world, where you compete every day,” he says. Garibaldi notes that learning how to work in the structure of a team toward one goal and remaining competitive has propelled him throughout his career. In his current role, Garibaldi is responsible for nine distribution centers in the Western U.S. that serve around 6,000 retail grocery stores. That service area generates about $8 billion in purchases annually and is one of the largest divisions in the company— and is still growing.