Posts Tagged “feature”
From South Carolina peaches to Tar Heel state watermelons and finally – New York vegetables, here some loading opportunities.
South Carolina peaches shippers are touting one of their best seasons ever.
The peach state should easily surpass 4 million 25-pound boxes this season. This compares to last season when 3.5 million boxes were shipped.
South Carolina now has 20,000 acres of peach orchards, and recently surpassed the half-way mark in the season. The biggest peach shipper in the state is Titan Farms in Ridge Spring, SC, which has shipped about a million boxes this season and another million boxes is left to be moved. The shipper is reported to be loading about 100 truck loads per week.
Another shipper in the state is McLeod Farms in McBee, SC, which has peaches coming of off 650 acres.
South Carolina ranks second in peach shipments, with the Upstate and The Ridge area of the state, producing about 80 percent of the state’s peaches.
South Carolina peaches and vegetables – grossing bout $3200 to New York City.
North Carolina Watermelon Shipments
Watermelon rates went a little “crazy” this past week from the Tar Heel state, jumping by as much as 35 percent to Baltimore and Philly. Volume has jumped, with the state moving over 600 truck loads per week.
North Carolina watermelons – grossing about $1600 Baltimore.
New York Produce Shipments
Cabbage, beans and other vegetables from central and western areas of New York state are increasing in volume.
Michigan fresh blueberry shipment will be done much earlier this year than normal, and total volumes will be well below previous estimates.
If that isn’t disappointing enough there’s now a shipping gap this week which will last through August 10th. The lull in loadings is occurring with the transition from bluecrop to elliot varieties.
About 46 million pounds of fresh-market Michigan fruit should be shipped this season. This compares to about 47 million pounds shipped in both 2014 and 2013.
Fewer shipments this year dates back to bitter winter weather. Bushes less than one year of age and bushes older than five or six years were hit particularly hard, which will have a lingering effect on production. The next two or three seasons expect Michigan blueberry shipments to be down.
So the overall effects of the cold winter and subsequent June drop on the 2014-15 crop will be heavy when final damages are tabulated, and the effects will continue to be felt next season and beyond.
Late-season elliots, which are starting this week, survived the winter much better than earlier varieties. Shipments will be heavier in the later part of the season than in the early, which is completely backwards.
Michigan Vegetable Shipments
Michigan vegetable shipments are increasing or entering their peak season on items ranging from celery to cabbage, cucumbers, eggplant and squash, among others.
Michigan produce – grossing about $2800 to Dallas.
By DeltaTrak
Pleasanton, California – DeltaTrak® Inc., a leading innovator of cold chain and environmental monitoring solutions, and Modality Solutions, a cold chain management engineering firm, are pleased to announce an expanded partnership. With Modality’s insight in thermal packaging, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt expertise, transport validation, and logistics solutions, combined with DeltaTrak’s certified temperature monitoring solutions, the relationship is a perfect integration of cold chain logistics capabilities.
The partnership gives customers full access to auditing assessments and gap analysis for GDP/GMP compliance audits, cargo security audits, cold chain risk assessments, and environmental assessments. Customers will also have access to engineering and consulting services for cold chain procedures, controlled environment logistics processes, biopharma product transportation, and formulations for transport.
“Having a value-added partner like Modality Solutions provides DeltaTrak clients with an applications solutions partner,” said DeltaTrak’s President, Frederick Wu. “Their implementation services ensure a compliant transition of technology, including qualification/validation, change control, and corrective/preventive actions (CAPA) management. Modality can also identify and validate new global routes and shipping lanes, and help with audit preparations and assistance on CAPAs from previous audits.”
“Any temperature excursion, either above or below the approved temperature, can result in quality issues and potential loss of products,” said Modality Solutions President, Gary Hutchinson. “Partnering with DeltaTrak allows us to offer cost-effective monitoring solutions and FlashTrak Telematics technology to help improve cold chain management from manufacturing to distribution.”
DeltaTrak®, founded in 1989, offers end-to-end cold chain management, environmental monitoring, and food safety solutions for the food, pharmaceutical, life sciences and chemical industries. DeltaTrak® provides high quality instruments, cloud-based software and services, and traceability during the storage, transport and handling of temperature sensitive commodities.
Founded in 2011, Modality Solution’s key areas of service include: regulatory compliance, cold chain thermal packaging design/qualification and controlled environment logistics solutions, transport simulation testing, streamlining development cycle times for route-to-market applications, and transport validation strategies to support global regulatory applications.
Here are nine facts you probably did not know about avocados.
(1)**You can judge when an avocado is ready to eat by squeezing it. Color alone does not indicate if an avocado is ripe. Hold the fruit in your palm and then gently squeeze, being careful not to bruise the fruit. It should be firm, but give to gentle pressure.
(2)**Avocados used to be served only to royalty and were a symbol of wealth. Now, you can enjoy them anytime!
(3)**The most popular avocado is the Hass variety, named after mailman Rudolph Hass from La Habra Heights, Calif. He patented his tree in 1935.
(4)**Avocados can be used as an ingredient in desserts. In Brazil, avocados are a popuklar ingredieint for ice creams and in the Philippines they pur’ee avocados with sugar and milk for a dessert drink.
(5)**To ripen, they have to be plucked from trees. To help ripen an avocado, place it in a brown bag and keep in a cool spot for two to three days.
(6)**During the Super Bowl, there are more than 8 million pounds of avocados eaten across America. And during Cinco de Mayo, there are about 14 million pounds eaten.
(7)**Avocados don’t self-pollinate; they need another avocado tree close by to produce fruit. The avocado is an Aztec symbol of love and fertility and they only grow in pairs.
(8)**Avocados were used as a spread instead of butter when European sailors traveled to the New World. Learning from the past, avocados are a healthy alternative to butter, mayonnaise, sour cream, and cream cheese.
(9)**Another name for the Hass avocado is the Alligator Pear because of its bumpy, green skin and pear shape.
Here’s an update of imported produce items ranging from onions to asparagus, plus what’s coming up with domestic onion shipments.
Onion shipments are steadily declining from the Vidalia region in Southeastern Georgia. The next sweet onions from a new crop will be arriving by boat from Peru in the middle of August. Meanwhile, New Mexico onions continue to be shipped and will be ending around the second week of August….Yellow, white and red onions loadings will start from the Delta and Montrose area of Colorado about August 20th….These same colored onions are starting out of Utah about the third week of September….Idaho and Oregon onion shipments are expected to start early this year, around August 1st.
Peruvian Asparagus
Imports of asparagus from Peru, primarily to Florida and other eastern ports is expected to be similar to a year ago. Supplies in the first eight months of 2014 ranged from 2.6 million pounds in February to 18.3 million pounds in August. However, arrivals are expected to peak the last four months of this year. Last year, there was about 26 million pounds shipped to the U.S. in September 2014, 28 million pounds in October, 24 million pounds in November and 26 million pounds in December.
Southern New Mexico onions – grossing about $3200 to Atlanta.
Here’s a quick look at Western produce shipments, starting in British Columbia, extending down to California and wrapping up in West Texas and New Mexico.
While Washington state cherry shipments are in a seasonal decline, loadings from British Columbia are picking up.
British Columbia certainly is no Washington state when it comes to volume, but the Canadians do provide decent loadings for about a four to six-week period every year. Shipments from an area ranging from Kelowna to Creston are underway with about 100,000 cases already shipped. There is an estimated 500,000 additional boxes to be shipped. The season is expected to last through the third week of August.
California Produce Shipments
Stone fruit shipments continue steady from week to week out of the San Joaquin Valley, led by peaches….From the valley’s Westside district various melons are being loaded, led by cantaloupe, averaging about a 1000 loads per week….Moving to the Watsonville district movement continues steady with strawberries, averaging around 875 truck loads weekly. California produce rates continue to decline, some by as much 15 percent in the past week.
Watsonville berries and Salinas Valley vegetables – grossing about $6500 to New York City.
San Joaquin Valley stone fruit, melons and other items – grossing about $4300 Dallas.
Texas/New Mexico Produce Shipments
In West Texas, the Hereford High Plains area has light, but increasing volume with potatoes, with some shippers also in Eastern New Mexico. Southern New Mexico also continues to ship onions.
Most late summer and fall New York vegetable shipments are going to have substantially less volume, and loading opportunities are going to be a mess, because of unpredictable shipping gapes. Blame it all on Mother Nature and torrential rains in recent weeks.
The heavy rains resulted in flooded fields, disrupted plantings and are expected to produce supply gaps for many vegetables, including sweet corn, green beans, cabbage, squash, cucumbers, onions and potatoes.
For example the down pours delayed the planting of cabbage for 21 days at Hansen Farms LLC, Stanley, N.Y.. which will result in shipping gaps through out the season. Yields will be down, which means volume for shipping will be lower – probably significantly.
While there is little talk of quality issues at this point, and most talk is playing up less volume without quality being affected – don’t necessarily count on it. This should be a concern if you are hauling New York product and just be extra observant what is being put in the truck.
While no percentage losses for volume are available yet on most items, one number being thrown around is both New York potato and onion shipments are expected to be off by 30 percent.
Western New York vegetable shipments – grossing about $1200 to Boston.
A presentation on consumer trends by the Nielsen Perishables Group seems to contradict the widely held belief hat fresh produce consumption is just not increasing on a per-capita basis. The talk was presented recently at the annual United Fresh Produce Association Convention in Chicago.
Jonna Parker, a director for that organization, said over the past five years, dollar volume of fresh produce has increased about 25 percent while unit volume is up 10-13 percent.
Of the top 10 growth items in the grocery sector, six are fresh produce, including two value-added products, specialty fruit, avocados, pineapples and cooking greens, with that last category topped by kale, she said.
Statistics show that annually the average American household spends $338 on fresh produce, compared to only $299 on meat, which comes in second place in dollar sales.
While most customers claim produce is the most important department in picking a store, there are still many trips to the market that do not include a produce purchase. More than half of the times that a person goes to the supermarket they do not put a produce item in their basket.
Currently, the average shopper makes about 40 to 50 supermarket trips per year. Parker said higher-income households (in excess of an annual income of $100,000) are far more prolific produce buyers. They make 51 trips per year and purchase about $454 worth of fresh produce. The least affluent consumers make about 40 trips per year to the supermarket and spend just $221 on produce.
Bananas claim over 50 percent of the volume of fresh fruit imports,” said the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Excluding bananas, fresh fruit imports rose from 12 percent of domestic consumption.
Bananas are sold the year around in the this country and rank number one in U.S. per capita fresh fruit consumption, followed by apples and oranges. To meet U.S. demand, bananas are imported, primarily from Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia and Honduras. Excluding bananas, fruit imports increased an average 7 percent annually over the past two decades.
U.S. fruit imports rose during the last three decades, partly owing to the growing minority ethnic populations in the United States and to an increased demand for new products. Not only have imports expanded for commodities already produced domestically and created competition for U.S. producers, but imports have also increased for nontraditional fruits, especially many tropical fruits.
- Eat at least one banana a day, they are said to contain everything a human needs and they contain all the 8 amino-acids our body cannot produce itself.
- Bananas are a good source of fiber, potassium and vitamin C;
- Red bananas are often dried and converted to meal which is used in many ways;
- Red bananas contain more vitamin C as yellow bananas (the redder a fruit, the more nutritious elements it contains).
Consumption of grapes helped glucose metabolism in an animal model of prediabetes, according to preliminary findings in a study by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
The results were presented at the Experimental Biology annual meeting in Boston earlier this spring, according to a news release.
Lead investigator Andrew Neilson and his fellow researchers looked at the impact of grapes on blood glucose when the activities of glucagon-like-peptide, or GLP-1, a hormone type known to improve insulin response after meals, is impaired.
A reduced insulin response is partly responsible for high blood sugar levels. Prediabetes is defined as impaired glucose tolerance and other symptoms approaching clinically diagnosed diabetes. An estimated 35% of U.S. adults are prediabetic.
In the study, the group that was administered freeze-dried whole grape powder was able to keep blood glucose levels stable, and counteract the negative effect of the inhibited activities of GLP-1. In the group that did not receive grapes, blood glucose levels rose when GLP-1 activities were impaired.
“These findings demonstrate the potential for grapes to help prevent impaired glucose tolerance in a prediabetic population,” Neilson said in the release. “This could have important implications for public health, in which the incidence of prediabetes is on the rise, and more study in this area is needed.”