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Food Companies Boost Local Economy

New tangerine varieties from UC research are hot commodities these days but they are not the only ag product that has gained recent public notice. This month press reports suggest that they still ” scream for ice cream” and  people around the world are going nuts for our nut varieties.  Sometimes all the activity leads to a good old fashioned food fight.

new Halo brand from Paramount Citrus

Food Fight For Tangerines:

These past few weeks competition to market those wonderful new seedless tangerines/mandarins has burgeoned into a real food fight. Three major players market most of the new varieties from California even as tangerine supply from Florida are on a down slide,along with all their citrus.

The 2011-2012 California tangerine crop was up 4 percent from  the season before says USDA but this year tangerine production in California is forecast to be 27.0 million cartons for 2012-2013 – a 24 percent increase over the last season.

In part that is due to a great number of non-bearing,new trees that were planted in the past few years that are now  coming into production. As of 2012 there  were nearly 6000 acres of new tangerine trees planted since 2009 out of about 43,000 acres statewide. Of that the acreage now in the ground in Kern and Tulare counties accounts for over 27,000 acres.
So it is no wonder that the three major players in this industry are jostling to market the new crop of seedless or nearly seedless easy peel fruit coming off  Valley trees. In recent weeks Exeter-based Sun Pacific announced its acquisition of the Cuties trademark and the end of its partnership with Paramount Citrus, with Cutler based Wawona Packing Co. and Reedley-based Moonlight Companies LLC  joining their Cuties Cooperative. The Cuties trademark on clementines and mandarins dates from 2001-  owned equally by Sun Pacific and Paramount Citrus until about May 20 of this year when the sale was announced after some litigation.

Then Paramount announced marketing for the new Halo brand they plan to promote with a hefty marketing budget of $ 100 million to let moms know about the new brand.
“Over the past few years, moms have really fallen in love with this fruit,” David Krause, president of Paramount Citrus, said in a press release. “For children, it’s a healthy alternative to fatty foods like chips and cookies. Kids love the taste, and the small size and the easy ‘peel-ability’ make this different from other fruits. Halos are fun to peel and sweet to eat. This is a perfect snack for parents and their little angels.”

Now Sun Pacific has hosted a grower convention June 11 in Visalia to encourage more growers to ship with them.

CEO of Sun Pacific Berne Evan attending the Visalia session was quoted in the trade press saying “We have a tremendous following in retail from Wal-Mart, Sams Club, Kroger, Costco — you name it,” Evans said. “Not that they’re on the hook, but they like Cuties and want to continue so we need more volume.

“Last year we sold under Cuties about 100 million 5-pound boxes for a packinghouse f.o.b. around $450 million,” he said. “It’s going to be a $1 billion industry before it’s over, probably bigger than the navel industry. That’s the way it is in Europe, anyway. They sell 500 million boxes of clementines to the same population. We’re selling 60 million.”

About 160 growers attended the powwow.

Not to be left behind Sunkist wants to be a bigger player in this arena.  At this year’s annual meeting Sunkist chairman Mark Gillette said “Sunkist’s customer-focused approach guides everything we do,” said Mark Gillette, re-elected chairman of Sunkist’s Board of Directors.Gillette is a Dinuba farmer and president of Sunkist-affiliated Gillette Citrus Inc. “Our growers, including myself, are expanding production of newer varieties consumers favor because we know it will continue to improve our sales success for years to come.”


Because The Cows Are Here

A recent Valley Public Radio show spotlights ice cream made in the Central Valley. Here are some excerpts.

Clifford Fung, eats a lot of ice cream. Three to five times a day Fung and his crew of ice cream tasters chop taste and decide if the Haagen-Dazs ice cream made in Tulare, California, is one… palatable and two … worthy of your freezer and belly.

Fung works at the smaller of Nestlé’s two ice cream factories in the region. It’s second only to the Dreyer’s ice cream facility in Bakersfield, which the company claims is the largest ice cream plant in the world.”

Nestlé’s Bakersfield and Tulare plants alone use just under 1 billion gallons of dairy products each year.
Nestlé in Kern County employees 1,200 people at their Dreyer’s Bakersfield plant. But the Valley wasn’t always an industrial scale ice cream Mecca.

Around the turn of the century Bill Dreyer immigrated to America from Germany and started an ice cream business in Oakland. In  2003, Dreyer’s  began operations in Bakersfield thanks to the San Joaquin Valley’s strong agricultural economy. In 2005, they expanded the facility, eventually shifting production to the valley from older plants in Commerce and Union City.
“The reason that we are located here in Bakersfield is number one, we are closest to the raw materials, we’re closest to the dairy source primarily and close to some of the other agricultural products that we include in our ice cream, such as nuts.”

Today the 600,000 square foot Bakersfield facility accounts for 33 percent of Nestlé’s domestic ice cream production.
Dreyer’s also came up with the original flavor Rocky Road, after the stock market crash in 1929 to make people smile during rocky times.
Just like Dreyer’s, the minds behind Haagen-Dazs saw Central California as the best kept secret for ice cream production. The so-called “superpremium” brand was licensed to Nestlé Dreyer’s in 2003.

In the case of Haagen-Dazs the decision to locate a factory in Tulare in the 1980’s was initially met with skepticism from the company’s founder, Reuben Mattus.  But according to Maci Daramy, new products manager at the Haagen-Dazs plant in Tulare: “They flew him out here, he saw the area and he thought Tulare would be a great place to make this ice cream, ultimately, because this is where the cows are.”

The company with the funny name started in the Bronx, New York in the 1960’s and is now owned by General Mills Inc. worldwide – licensed to Nestle in the U.S. and Canada.
“We have a constant supply, a constant flow coming in from these dairies. The flavor of that milk is always very consistent because the herds eat very similar nutrients for their diets, because the milk that a cow produces – the taste is really determined by what they eat.” – Maci Daramy

“We have a lot of larger scale dairies that we can provide a lot of milk to the factory,” says Daramy. “We have a constant supply, a constant flow coming in from these dairies. The flavor of that milk is always very consistent because the herds eat very similar nutrients for their diets, because the milk that a cow produces – the taste is really determined by what they eat.”


Nuts: Diamond Works To Regain Footing
Working to regain the trust of walnut growers after an accounting scandal SF-based Diamond Foods are relaunching their Emerald brand and looking to rebuild its walnut supply.
A June 11 press account with president of the company of Brian Driscoll mentions the difficulty in getting enough walnuts even as demand for nuts has skyrocketed and the industry as a whole is thriving.

“We are seeing positive signs from the grower community, but it is difficult at this stage to determine if these positive sentiments will translate into an increase in supply in the short term,” Mr. Driscoll said. “That said, the work we have done to provide contract terms, services and pricing to growers that are competitive with alternatives they may have appears to be resonating. … As I’ve indicated before, it will take time to rebuild our position, but doing so can produce attractive long-term economic benefits to Diamond.

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