HARTFORD, CT — Two major building projects — one that looks to begin as early as this fall, the other with a less definite time frame — are on track at the Connecticut Regional Produce Market, according to the state official who is overseeing both developments. The first project, scheduled to begin this November, is a new tomato facility for M&M Produce Inc., one of the wholesale companies on the market. The entire site for the new tomato facility as well as for possible additional construction by M&M is about one-and-a-half acres, according to Robert Pellegrino, executive director of what is

Gordon Robertson, vice president of sales and marketing for Sun World Inc. in Bakersfield, CA, said that he used to have to wait until the end of the month or even the end of the quarter to get a thorough picture of sales department figures. Today, he pulls up a screen on his computer and has instant access to the sales numbers as well as how profitable each sale was measured against the exact cost of producing that product. "This is an invaluable tool for us," he said. “You can take data and turn it into action today. I don't have to wait 30 days after the fact to find out what was going on.”

A fungus is threatening the U.S. basil crop for both home growers and commercial operations. "In the U.S., downy mildew on basil first reared its ugly head on a commercial farm in Florida in 2007," Margaret McGrath, associate professor in the department of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, told The Produce News. “It appears that other commercial growers also had it, but because it's new to the U.S., they didn’t know what it was when they first detected it.” Since then, the fungus has surfaced in both commercial farms and backyard gardens in several

A short nine months ago, the Vidalia, GA, onion industry was looking trouble square in the eye. Torrential rains in December washed away plantings. Abnormally cold weather followed in January and February. March was too cool and too rainy. Growers wondered if the season could be salvaged. With the last of the Vidalia storage crop expected to be shipped by mid- August, growers may now be wondering if they will ever have another year as good as this one. Despite early losses to weather, later-season weather was perfect, production was solid, crop quality was spectacular, markets stayed strong

Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets, the European-owned small-format retail chain making a splash in the West, has expanded a program that promises consumers farm-fresh produce in the store within 24 hours of its harvest. Brendan Wonnacott, communications director for the Tesco-owned operation that is based in Southern California, told The Produce News, "We launched the program quietly last year because, as you can imagine, it's a hard thing to pull off." Called Farm to Store in 24, the program features fresh-packed produce with a label that tells the consumer that the product was picked less

MONTEREY, CA -- At the Produce Marketing Association's Foodservice Conference & Exposition, here, in July 2009, PMA President Bryan Silbermann announced a new collaborative initiative among three industry associations with the objective of doubling produce consumption in foodservice over the next decade. That effort is well underway and continues to be a major focus of PMA. At the opening general session of the 2010 PMA Foodservice Conference & Expo, Mr. Silbermann talked about the progress that is being made in building a program to make the realization of that goal a reality. Together with