Fresh grape volume up just a little this year for Bari Produce
Fresh grape volume up just a little this year for Bari Produce
Bari Produce LLC in Madera, CA, expects to harvest and pack around 1.25 million boxes of fresh grapes this year, according to Justin Bedwell, managing partner. “That is up a little bit from last year,” but it is due to production increases in existing acreage, not to new acreage, he said.
The biggest production increases for the company will be in the Scarlet Royal and Autumn King varieties, he added.
Bari Produce began its 2014 grape harvest around July 8 with the Summer Royal black seedless variety with Flame Seedless and Red Globe seeded varieties beginning around July 14. “Then we get into our later varieties,” he said. Autumn King green seedless grapes will start around August 15, with Autumn Royal black seedless grapes and Scarlet Royal red seedless grapes starting about the end of August.
“Logoluso Farms is our largest grower,” Bedwell said. “That is my family’s fruit, and most of their ranches are on the West Side [of California’s San Joaquin Valley].” Those ranches have been impacted due to the California drought and reduced agricultural water allocations.
“Because of that, we have halted expansion,” Bedwell said. “There are a lot of new varieties we have been looking at,” some from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and some from private breeders, “but we haven’t really pulled the trigger yet because we don’t know what our water situation will be.”
As with most California grape packers, pouch bags now account for a large proportion of the grape packaging put up by Bari, but the company also continues to pack traditional poly bags.
That can create a challenge “when we are looking at boxes that look the same but have different bags inside of them,” Bedwell said. If they all look the same to the forklift driver, it would be easy to load the wrong pallets.
Bari Produce is addressing that issue by trying to keep the different types of bags separated by label.
The company packs several different labels, “and each label will have a certain type of bag associated with it so we can keep everything straight.”
For example, he said, “‘Bari’ is my [higher] label. Then I’ve got ‘Logoluso,’ which is just under that, so I know what the grape specs should be for each variety. If I can keep my pouch bags in my higher label — those are the ones I want to ask more money for — it should help.”
