In its sixth year of growing Asian vegetables, Mont Saint-Hilaire-based Organzo is looking to add an American grower to its team. “We were recently in Georgia looking to add an American grower, it will be smaller acreage to begin but the goal is to achieve year-round growing,” said Julie Nichols, president and founder of Organzo. “We are also looking for additional growers in the U.S.”

Bloomington, CA-based Index Fresh, a grower-owned packing, marketing and shipping company, announced that KEITH BLANCHARD has joined its field staff, effective July 31.

Columbia Marketing International, headquartered in Wenatchee, WA, will market a quality pear crop this season. “There will be plenty of promotable pears,” said Vice President of Marketing Bob Mast. His assessment comes on the heels of information about a July 20 storm cell that caused damage to fruit-growing regions in Washington.

According to Mr. Mast, Washington’s coming apple crop will be affected the storm. He said there may be some surface damage to the skins of some pear varieties. But he expects some of the blemishing will be resolved as the fruit matures.

Calavo Growers Inc. announced the completion of the expansion of fresh avocado packing operations at its Uruapan, Michoacán, Mexico, facility to keep pace with strong consumer demand.

The company, a global avocado-industry leader and an expanding provider of value-added fresh food, said that the upgrades provide Calavo's Uruapan packinghouse with the capacity to pack at least 6 million pounds of fruit per week -- a 200 percent increase over prior output.

In the mid-1990s apple growers in California were producing 10 million boxes of apples annually. Today, growers there produce between 2.5 million boxes and 3 million boxes, and that number has held as about average over the past several years.

Alex Ott, executive director of the California Apple Commission in Fresno, CA, told The Produce News that in the 1990s, mostly Fuji and Granny Smith apples were produced in the state.

Kennett Square, PA, bills itself as the Mushroom Capitol of the World, and producers there grow about 65 percent of the nation’s mushrooms. In the early 1980s, annual dinners were held there, and in 1985 the gatherings became more formalized with the Mushroom Festival, a celebration held the second weekend of September each year in downtown Kennett Square.

Starting in 1992, official proclamations of September as Mushroom Month from the U.S. secretary of agriculture and the governor of Pennsylvania added more formal recognition and notoriety.