Despite a late start to the season, the first Peruvian sweet onions from Glennville, GA-based Bland Farms LLC are already making their way to the U.S. market and the company believes it can transition smoothly from the end of its Vidalia storage deal into the Peruvian fresh market with little or no gap.

Vidalia is still king, but Peruvians are a major part of Bland Farms’ sweet onion program. (Photo by Chip Carter)“We’re shipping from down there now but naturally it takes quite a bit of time to get everything up to volume,” owner Delbert Bland told The Produce News in mid-August. “But we should have good supplies by the time we finish Vidalias and we’re finishing them pretty strong. We should run somewhere around the first of September with them and feel like we’ll have ample supplies to make the transition to Peruvian. We’re going to be very close to having enough Peruvian onions in-house to continue and not have to slow down shipping. Our intent is to transition from Vidalia to Peru almost immediately.”

The second half of the Vidalia season was not as bountiful as hoped, so Bland committed to service its core clientele first with the storage crop. The strategy should keep Bland sweet onions on the shelf without a gap.

“Our game plan each season is to be first grower-shipper with Vidalias and the last one,” Bland said. “For a month-and-a-half now we’ve only been letting our core customers have Vidalias. We could have sold out a month ago, but when you get that shelf space going, you want to keep the consumer focused on a true sweet onion as long as you can. Vidalia’s the best one you can get and Peru is right behind. We’re shipping heavy volume of Vidalias right now and will be the rest of this month. We’re running the numbers every day to make sure we don’t let too many out the door — that’s what this business is all about, taking care of the people who take care of you.”

Maintaining core relationships and building new ones has kept Bland on top of its game for years now.

“If you were a buyer and were looking at people who ship sweet onions, what separates one from the other? In times like this it’s being able to have a consistent, good quality supply,” Bland said. “We’ve been very fortunate because we do have a lot of storage on Vidalias. That’s what we’re geared up for and you have to have a lot to go all the way through the summer.”

Meanwhile, Bland’s Peruvian crop looks very good in the early going. Even more significantly, this year the company is growing the majority of its Peruvian sweets rather than rely on local growers for a product that is increasingly in demand.

“The Peruvian operation has come together very well,” said Bland, who sold his first Peruvian sweets 18 years ago. “One thing we’ve done this year, we’re growing a lot more of our volume ourselves than we ever have before — at least 60-70 percent of everything we bring out of Peru is going to be stuff we grew.”

When Bland first entered the Peruvian deal “it was small farms that were really thankful to have the opportunity to sell in the U.S. market. Now they’ve gotten more modernized and it’s more of a produce industry mentality: They forget what you did for them yesterday, they want to know what you’re going to do for them now. That’s not throwing off on the Peruvian growers — they’re more business-savvy than they used to be and that onion is more sought-after than it used to be. It’s a world market now.”

Growing most of its own crop “is the only way you’re assured of getting the supply you need and making sure you’re in control of quality,” Bland said. “You’re guaranteed supply and know what you’re getting.”