Eat a slice of fresh tomato from the supermarket or at a restaurant this winter, and chances are it will have come from a field in south-central Florida, site of 90 percent of U.S. winter tomato production.

And this year, there’s a fighting chance that the worker who picked it might have made something close to a living wage. That’s because huge Florida farm called East Coast Growers and Packers—one of the state’s four largest tomato tomato growers—has agreed to deliver a penny-per-pound raise to farm workers, representing a pay boost of about 64 percent. With East Coast committed to making sure the raise end’s up in farm workers’ pockets, the state’s other large growers may soon follow suit.

The movement to improve conditions for Florida’s pickers has been a long and difficult one. The scrappy worker-led Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has been pushing for decades to improve conditions and pay in tomato country. I visited the the area myself last spring—and was stunned to see that despite all the progress and publicity, living conditions remain dismal and pay absurdly low. Given that level of normal, everyday exploitation, it’s not surprising that in extreme situations, cases of modern-day slavery regularly crop up in the area.

Years ago, the CIW realized that merely demanding raises from the area’s large-scale tomato growers wasn’t likely to improve conditions much. The growers themselves operate in a highly competitive market, dominated by large-scale food industry buyers like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Those companies used their market power to keep tomato prices low—if Florida’s growers don’t like the prices they were offering, they could threaten to buy their tomatoes from Mexico.