The Center for Produce Safety has launched its newly redesigned website and new Web address. The website has been reconstructed to make navigation easier, incorporating a new set of search functions to make CPS-funded research results and ongoing projects easier to find.

Vision Import Group has hired Steve Hitchings as its new general manager in the Southeast Office in Lakeland, FL, effective Jan. 5. Hitchings, who has more than 34 years of procurement and sales experience in produce, will work under the direction of Ronnie Cohen, Vision Import Group vice president of sales and partner.

“We have excellent quality apples this season,” said Kaari Stannard, president of New York Apple Sales Inc., headquartered in Castleton, NY. Pack-outs are higher this year and we have a very good stored crop for taste and quality.”

Stannard added that demand was also very good in early December.

At two Organic Trade Association-sponsored seminars in Japan in late 2014, more than 100 of that country’s top grocery retail food importers and distributors learned that athletes competing in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo will be eating organic. The OTA stated that this is the ambitious plan of Taka Yamaguchi, executive officer of Organic Japan.

Union workers at Hunts Point Terminal Market say workers who handle fruits and vegetables at the market, located in South Bronx, NY, have voted to authorize a strike as the deadline for a new contract looms closer, according to a report by ABC affiliate WABC-TV New York.

The strike is scheduled to start on Friday morning, Jan. 16, just as the bell strikes past midnight.

Members of Teamsters Local 202 voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike Tuesday, Jan. 13, stopping work at the market as soon as Friday morning.

Price Chopper’s 2014 Check Out Hunger campaign, an annual giving program that was available at all 134 store locations, raised more than $47,000 and 29 tons of food for 12 local food banks and their affiliated kitchens and pantries in the chain’s six-state footprint: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont.