When it comes to Peruvian asparagus, Progressive Produce Corp. and Keystone Fruit Marketing Inc. believe their collaborative efforts offers their customers unmatched service.

For the past six years, Keystone, which is headquartered in Greencastle, PA, and Progressive, which calls Los Angeles its home base, have worked the Peruvian asparagus deal together in a unique partnership. They share an office in Peru, source together and transport the product in tandem to the East and West coasts. They also share information and can service each other’s customers when the need arise.

In general, Keystone takes care of the eastern half of the country while Progressive concentrates its efforts in the West.

“Generally it works that way,” said Don Hessel, who carries the title of general manager of the Keystone/Progressive asparagus deal.

Mr. Hessel is headquartered in Los Angeles but at the time of this interview on July 30, he just returned from a week in Keystone’s offices getting ready for the peak asparagus deal. He said that the key to the collaboration is communication.

“We have a joint office in Peru that is under the Keystone banner and we both deal directly with that office and talk every day,” he said.

Tracy Wood, who works in sales for Keystone in Vero Beach, FL, agreed that communication is the key to their joint success. That high level of synchronized communication was on display as in individual interviews separated by a couple of days late last month, both men mirrored the other in discussing the 2012 Peruvian asparagus crop.

“It looks like overall supplies are going to be down slightly,” said Mr. Wood, “but our supplies should be fairly steady.”

Mr. Hessel concurred. “Our volume is expected to be about the same this year. If anything, it might be down just a little bit because overall supplies are expected to take a little bit of a dip. Volume to date is running behind last year.”

Mr. Hessel pointed to increased demand from processors as the reason fresh supplies are off. This is the same reason that the f.o.b. price is stronger right now than it was a year ago and is projected to remain that way through the heavy fall shipping period.

Mr. Wood said the Keystone/Progressive collaboration results in the traditional 11-pound carton being its most popular pack. They also sell a 28-pound carton and they have packs for both white and green asparagus. He said the newest addition to their stable of Peruvian asparagus items is a pack that features green asparagus in a consistent grill size, with one pound of product per consumer pack.

The combined companies also have experience with a pre-peeled eight-ounce pack of white asparagus that is microwavable.

Mr. Hessel explained the efforts by stating that they are always looking for new items as retailers like those points of differentiation. For this year, he said there are a couple of ideas under consideration but nothing for certain, so he decided to keep the new concepts under wraps for a little bit longer.