With harvest in full swing throughout the four growing regions of the Pacific Northwest, the pear industry released the first official estimate of the 2021-22 fresh pear crop for Washington and Oregon: 16.1 million standard box equivalents, which is very close to the four-year average.

Walmart Inc. has partnered with Meredith Corp.,  a multi-platform media company reaching nearly 95 percent of women in the U.S., to help millions of families plan and prepare meals faster and more easily through AI-powered meal planning, shoppable recipes, visual search, chatbots and more.

There’s good news coming out of Wisconsin and Bushmans Inc., which as of mid-August was seeing strong potato crops for the upcoming season.

“There has been some rain, but by-and-large, the crop has been looking really good so if we can just get it out of the ground and into storage, we’re going to be in good shape,” said Mike Carter, CEO of the Rosholt, WI-based company.

After much industry buzz in 2020, Verdant Technologies announces the roll out of its HarvestHold Fresh product life extension solution to the produce industry, after receiving EPA registration in early September. HarvestHold is a 1-MCP-based post-harvest solution that extends the usable product life of fruits, vegetables and flowers by an average of 40-50 percent and significantly reduces wastage in perishable supply chains. Verdant’s floral life extension solution, HarvestHold Bloom, was made available to global floral markets in late 2020.

Amazon announced that next year Whole Foods Market customers in Washington, DC, and Sherman Oaks, CA, will have the option to skip the checkout line.

"Several years ago, our physical retail team asked ourselves how we could make the physical shopping experience better for customers," said Dilip Kumar, Amazon's vice president of physical retail and technology. "We saw that customers didn’t like standing in checkout lines, which is how we came up with the idea to build Just Walk Out technology.

The Wisconsin Potato & Vegetable Growers Association represents growers on governmental affairs and maintains a good relationship with the research team at UW-Madison as well as legislators to ensure that what is happening on a state level is benefitting growers and agriculture as a whole.