PHILADELPHIA -- It's been 100 days since the U.S. Department of Agriculture cleared Florida-grown UglyRipe tomatoes for distribution outside the Sunshine State, and the product's grower-marketer is now anxious to meet the large consumer demand for the tomato. Mike Maxwell, president of Procacci Brothers Sales Corp., here, told The Produce News that his firm expected to be shipping much larger volumes of tomatoes than it had in the past. The UglyRipe was bred in Procacci's own tomato research facility in Florida, and while the tomato is not necessarily pretty on the exterior, it is a throwback

PALM SPRINGS, CA -- Not surprisingly, food safety was the dominant topic of conversation at the United Fresh Produce Association's FreshTech conference, held here April 25-28. A two-day Produce Safety Summit, which preceded the event, was billed as a separate program. But for all intents and purposes, it was part of the FreshTech conference, as there was a seamless transition from one meeting to the next. In fact, a general session of the Produce Safety Summit also served as the opening keynote session for FreshTech and featured a prominent researcher, who discussed retail positioning. Both

Salinas, CA-based Colorful Harvest is now the exclusive grower-shipper for Green Giant Fresh melons nationwide. The deal, which had been in the works for about a year, was completed Thursday morning, May 3. Colorful Harvest will begin shipping cantaloupe and honeydew out of Tampa, FL, and Brawley, CA, beginning the week of May 7, according to Doug Ranno, Colorful Harvest's chief operating officer and general manager. Other California shipping points will include Mendota and Firebaugh, and melons also will ship from Yuma and Maricopa in Arizona. Already there are "pre-commitments of truckload

As the supermarket industry conforms to business culture in the 21st century, it is forced to adjust to contemporary ways of doing business, encounter unique forms of competition, face never-before-known challenges and initiate new, sometimes stringent, regulations. And no companies are more aware of the changing landscape of food retailing than organizations that have existed for decades. When brothers Nicholas (Nick) Sr. and Pasquale (Patsy) D'Agostino opened the first D'Agostino's grocery store in New York City in 1932, how they organized, operated and oversaw their business was undoubtedly

River Point Farms and CIC Partners have created a large, new onion company. The merger of American Onion Inc. and Rivergate Farms LLC created the new River Point Farms, with a major interest purchased by Dallas-based CIC Partners, a mid-market private equity firm. This transaction places River Point Farms among America's larger growers and processors of yellow, red and sweet onions, expected to produce over 400 million pounds of onions this year. "We're unique in that we design production around our customers needs, not the other way around," Robert Hale, president of River Point Farms, said

Price Chopper officials in Schenectady, NY, have announced the addition of more than 1,000 new natural and organic items to an already substantial array of lifestyle products in the chain's 115 stores in six Northeastern states. With more SKUs than can fit in the average store-within-a-store "boutique," the progressive 75-year-old grocery chain is integrating its better-for-you alternatives in almost every category across the store and supporting the expansion with aggressive promotional pricing, advertising, marketing and consumer-friendly educational outreach. A bright new yellow and