On the website of Mariani Nut Co., under the heading Retail/Supermarket Products, is the following summary of the company’s offerings for the retail trade:

“Since 1972, the Mariani family has been growing and producing the finest quality, premium nuts without compromise. Mariani nuts are freshly harvested from farms in California and packed in their natural form, without adding any preservatives, oil, salt, or other ingredients. We offer a full line of consumer packaging options that can be found in retail markets around the world.”

Located in Winters, CA, Mariani Nut Co. specializes in California walnuts and California almonds. The company also sources and markets pecans from various parts of the United States, according to Matt Mariani, who oversees the company’s sales and marketing activities.

In the company’s retail produce business, “we had another positive year,” Mariani told The Produce News. “Fortunately, distribution is growing and consumption is growing” for the products Mariani Nut Co. offers. “Consumers are beginning to recognize the attributes of the products” as well as their versatility.

“It is a healthy environment for our items for our industry,” he said.

From a packaging standpoint, Mariani Nut Co. is “looking to make sure we offer different options” to retailers and that those options “are appealing to the consumer.”

One of the company’s fastest-growing lines, he said, “is our clear produce line” that utilizes “a clear poly-type bag that offers maximum visibility of the product. But at the same time, we also offer a line of foil-style gusseted bags, and that packaging form is popular also.”

New from Mariani this year, he said, is a line of smaller pack sizes to give retailers “additional flexibility from a price point or unit cost standpoint.”

Displays are “always important,” particularly heading into the fall period and the holiday season, Mariani said. “To that end, we have tried to expand our offering of displays to help our retail partners get the product out on the floor and displayed prominently.”

The company offers floor shippers, and has done for several years, he said. “The latest addition is a new pallet display” that comes in either full-pallet or half-pallet configuration. “We can mix different shell nuts into that pallet — different SKUs,” he said.

The retail-ready display, which has “nice high-end graphics” depicting the nut orchards, “can be brought in and dropped on the floor,” reducing labor costs at store level, he said.

Introduced mid-season last year, the display unit has had positive response, “so going into the season this year, that is something we have really been emphasizing, and we expect good results on it this holiday season.”

Another thing the company is seeing more demand for from retail customers is in-store education, Mariani said. “That has really increased over the last 12 months, so we are partnering more now with in-store dieticians and nutritionists in doing custom promotional programs or communication programs to communicate the product attributes to retail chain consumers.”

The company has various in-store promotional campaigns throughout the year, but the one planned for this year’s holiday season “is a campaign with an ingredient concept” with nuts as “an integral ingredient for the holiday season, bringing together different food ingredients and bringing together the family at the same time.”

With respect to the 2013 nut crops, Mariani observed that projections for the California walnut crop and the California almond crop are both quite similar to last year.

“We just received hot off the press about an hour ago our official state objective estimate” for walnuts put together by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, he said. The report projects that the California walnut harvest will be 495,000 in-shell tons, less than one percent lower than the 2012 harvest.

The almond estimate is 1.85 billion meat pounds, down 7.5 percent from a subjective forecast made in May but just two percent below last year’s crop.

No definitive estimates were yet available, either out of the Northwest or out of the Southwest, for Pecans, which are harvested later than walnuts and almonds, he said. “We are keeping an eye on it.” But he has heard that inventories are getting tighter.

One major factor influencing the market for all three products, he said, is that importers in foreign countries have been “very active in purchasing tree nuts. That has added pressure to the market as a whole and makes supply less available than it otherwise would be.”