Nickey Gregory is a Georgia Bulldog, through and through. Make no mistake about it — he bleeds red and black. But he’d never let state rivalries get in the way of good business. That’s why when he saw a chance to get into the Miami market in 2011, roughly a decade after he founded the Nickey Gregory Co. on the Atlanta State Farmers Market, he jumped at it.

Drawing on generations of experience farming and shipping onions in Idaho-Eastern Oregon’s Treasure Valley, Murakami Produce is providing the marketplace with both excellent size and quality in Spanish Sweets this year.

Murakami Produce General Manager Grant Kitamura said in early November that although the region had seen challenges during the growing season, “the onions came in in good shape, and we do have excellent size and quality as well as manageable supplies. We always have big onions, and this year we have a full range of sizes from mediums up to super colossals.”

When Sunkist’s director of retail merchandising, Julie DeWolf, came from a consumer product group company to the nation’s largest citrus marketer, she was surprised that retail display bins weren’t in the firm’s marketing arsenal.

On the consumer products side, it was a well-developed and well-used strategy. “They offer an excellent opportunity to get a display in a secondary location,” she said.

Full Tilt Marketing, based in Cedarburg, WI, announced the hire of Kristin Ziegelbauer as a marketing assistant.

In her new role, Ziegelbauer will coordinate marketing projects, assist and develop social media campaigns and capture new digital technologies including video to enhance engagement.

Eat Smart is bringing something new to the salad kit category in North America. Apio Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Landec Corp. and a leading national producer of fresh-cut vegetable products, has launched two new Eat Smart Gourmet Vegetable Salad Kits as part of its superfood product line.

WASHINGTON — Different standards for packinghouses under the Food Safety Modernization Act based on their location will cause confusion within the industry and are not science-based, produce industry groups told officials at the Food & Drug Administration during a Thursday public meeting on FSMA changes.

Under the FDA's current interpretation of FSMA, on-farm packinghouses would need to meet produce safety standards, but off-farm operations, which must register with the FDA, would have to meet more extensive and costly preventive control requirements.