Being early with a crop can be a desirable thing when it hits a marketing window, but not when it comes in on top of an already glutted market. That is what happened at the start of the Central California onion deal this year, but growers were confident that it was only a temporary situation and prices would soon firm.

Stevco Inc., which is headquartered in Los Angeles and has branch offices in Nogales, AZ, and in Coachella and Bakersfield, CA, will once again have an increase in production of both Flame seedless grapes and Sugraone green seedless grapes during the early part of the season in California’s San Joaquin Valley, according to Jared Lane, vice president of sales and marketing.

The company had additional acreage in production in those varieties for the 2013 season. For 2014, Stevco will again “have a little bit added volume on both Sugraones and Flames,” Lane said May 29.

Telesis Onion Co. Inc.. in Five Points, CA, which produces red, yellow and white onions in the Huron and Five Points area, packs its products for both foodservice and retail customers.

“We do all boxes and all consumer bags,” Mike Smythe, a salesman with the company, said in a May 29 interview with The Produce News.

Last year, Telesis purchased a new Volm bagging machine to meet increased demand from retailers for consumer bags and also increased its stickering capacity.

For more than a decade, Eclipse Berry Farms has been one of the leaders in the California grape tomato deal

With its fields in the Oxnard Plains area of Ventura County and its sales office on the Westside of Los Angeles, it has carved out a nice niche selling only grape-type tomatoes in that category. Salesman Rick Hearst said the 2014 season for the firm is shaping up to be a fairly typical year. On Thursday, May 29, he told The Produce News that the firm’s production was about two weeks away from starting.

Since 1970, Turbana Corp., located in Coral Gables, FL, has been an industry leader in the production and distribution of a wide range of bananas and ethnic tropicals. Director of Marketing Marion Tabard said the company’s extensive offerings include conventional, organic and Fair Trade-certified bananas; exotic banana varieties such as baby, red and manzanos; plantains and burros; and pineapples.

This season, Organics Unlimited, headquartered in San Diego, is moving bananas into the Philadelphia market. “We just started going into Philadelphia a month-and-a-half ago,” said President Mayra Velazquez de Leon in late May. “We are shipping a container a week to test the waters.” The bananas are being shipped under the company’s “GROW” label. “There seems to be an interest in this,” she said.