“Our program is growing by leaps and bounds,” Louie Galvan, a partner in Delano, CA-based Fruit Royale told The Produce News April 1, referring to the company’s involvement in the Mexican grape deal.

“We are actually tripling our numbers from last year,” he said. “We have brought on a couple of sizeable growers, and we are making some moves to get involved in the growing process down there as well. We will have a sizeable deal.”

All of the company’s grapes from Mexico will ship out of Nogales, AZ, he said.

Fruit Royale will again be packing its bagged grapes in gusseted stand-up pouch bags. (Photo courtesy of Fruit Royale)“We are looking at a start date, we are being told, somewhere around the first or second of May, but definitely no later than the fifth,” beginning with Perlettes, he said. Those will be followed by Flames, possibly as early as “sometime during the week of the fifth.”

Other varieties Fruit Royale will have in the program are Summer Royal black seedless grapes, Sugraones, and “a few Red Globes and Autumn Royals at the end.”

The start dates this season are “a good 10 days ahead of where we were last year,” and it appears that that earliness may continue all the way through the deal, Galvan said.

Fruit Royale’s earlier grapes will come out of the Pesqueira region north of Hermosillo, Sonora. The company will also have grapes from the coastal area west of Hermosillo. “That is where we will stay for the duration of the deal,” Galvan said. “We don’t have any fruit in Caborca.”

Neither does the company currently have any grapes in the newer district of Guaymas. However, “we are working on that,” he added. “That will be coming in the next year or two. It could be as early as 2015.”

Elaborating on Fruit Royale’s increasing involvement in the growing side of the Mexican grape deal, Galvan said, “We are investing in some newly planted acreage.” That acreage “won’t give us a crop until the 2015 season.”

Meanwhile, the added acreage from new growers is expected to increase the company’s volume for the 2014 Sonora grape season to nearly 500,000 boxes, up from around 150,000 boxes last year. “It will keep growing from there,” he said.

When the young acreage begins producing in 2015, the program will see another increase, but “they won’t kick in 100 percent the first year. By 2016 is where those numbers are going to show up.” By then, “we will be getting up near three quarters of a million boxes,” he said.

From a packaging standpoint, “we put everything in the stand-up pouch,” Galvan added. This will be the third season that Fruit Royale has used the gusseted stand-up pouch bags.