Roch’s Fruit & Produce

An Important Midpoint Between the Farm
and the School Lunch Table

By Gloria DE Paola
Photos by Ryan Conaty

Ray Roch Sr. began selling local produce 57 years ago from the back of a truck in West Warwick’s Veterans Square. His customers were mill workers from the villages of Arctic and Centerville. Back then, in the early 1950s, housewives cooked their family meals from scratch and children carried their lunches to the nearby Maisie Quinn and John Horgan elementary schools in brown paper bags or metal lunch boxes decorated with pictures of Mickey Mouse and Roy Rogers.

Roch’s Market is still a family-run business that sources from area farms, but in addition to its West Warwick retail store, 16 refrigerated trucks deliver fruits and vegetables to restaurants, schools and hotels in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. A newer, upscale Roch’s market opened in Narragansett in 2002. But West Warwick is still a working class town—one of the poorest in the state.

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