Ready Pac Foods Inc. is pioneering implementation of Safe Quality Food certification in all the company's facilities and announced that the Florence, NJ, facility has achieved SQF Level 3 certification, the highest level possible. Ready Pac is now one of very few fresh-cut facilities to have achieved this level of certification in the United States.

It's a tricky business being in the tomato game during the summer months. A proliferation of homegrown product, small local farmers specializing in farmers markets and regional deals sticking to a geographic marketing area can flood the market and cause heartburn for the commercial tomato producer.

Joe Bernardi, president of Bernardi & Associates Inc., Nogales, AZ, said it really irks him when his neighbor four doors down in his Arizona community, brings him home-grown tomatoes. "August is the month everyone has more tomatoes than friends," he quipped.

With the recent passing of Louis Kertesz Sr., I dedicate this article to him as a former company colleague and friend.

Louis Kertesz Sr. was the vice president of produce operations at The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company Inc. in Montvale, NJ, during the 1980s. He was a first-class expert who changed the produce format into a giant aggressive selling machine. Not only did it change at A&P, but it also permeated throughout the industry.

Salinas, CA-based Mann Packing Co. has been famously known for its broccoli for more than a generation in the produce industry.

In fact, it was more than two decades ago that it chided then President George Bush for his public diss of the item by sending him a truckload of broccoli.

Today, Mann still considers broccoli its signature item, but the firm has expanded in many other directions, most notably down various value-added paths.

COMMERCE CITY, CO — While still moving product from across the country and out of Mexico, Ringer & Son brokerage in the Denver metro area is also transitioning into Colorado produce as well.

Sales agent Deb Pate, who works the Texas Valley and Colorado potatoes, peaches and apples, said during the second week of May that cabbage, limes, mangos, onions, peppers and tomatoes out of Texas, and coming in from Mexico, were moving well.

With a primary objective of building awareness for the nutritional value and versatility of traditional, no-sugar-added dried fruit, and with the specific immediate goal of keeping dried fruits in government food assistance programs, the California raisin, dried plum, dried fig and date industries came together in late 2008 to form the California Dried Fruit Coalition.