As a California-based year-round supplier of avocados, Calavo Growers Inc. in Santa Paula, CA, as with many California avocado companies, relies heavily on imported fruit to meet the growing demand from its customers, particularly during times of the year when domestically produced avocados are out of season or in light supply.

In Calavo’s case, “We are totally focused on California and Mexico,” Rob Wedin, vice president of fresh sales and marketing, told The Produce News last July. The company has avocado packinghouses in both California and Mexico, which between them offer year-round supplies of avocados.

Mexico is a “huge” part of the program, Wedin said in an interview Oct. 11. “It is extremely important. We are just now finishing the California season,” and Mexican fruit will dominate until the new California crop starts next spring. Other countries also export avocados to the United States, but for Calavo, “our focus is heavily on North America as a source.”

That enables Calavo to focus on the freshness of the product, he said. Coming out of Mexico, “we can get fruit” to Dallas within two days of harvest, to Santa Paula within three days of harvest, and to the company’s distribution center in New jersey within four days of harvest.

Rob Wedin, Calavo’s vice president of fresh sales and marketing.Calavo tripled the size of its packinghouse in Michoacán, Mexico, just two years ago, “and we are looking forward to really getting the efficiencies and the production out of the packinghouse” this season, he said. “We have been testing our capacities and making some changes in some places that needed a little bit of improvement, so we expect the production of the packinghouse to be very good.”

While the consumption of avocados in the U.S. market continues to increase, and Mexican imports continue to grow to meet that demand, a tripling of the size of Calavo’s Mexican facility does not reflect an expectation of a corresponding volume increase short term, nor a dramatic increase in market share, Wedin said. Rather, the focus is on efficiency and profitability.

“There are a lot of packinghouses down there,” he said. “What we need to do is make sure that our market share is profitable. We are not trying to go overboard, but we don’t want to buy fruit for more money than we are going to sell it for. We want to have the amount of fruit that we need to supply good customers.”

Continuing in that vein, Wedin, who has been with Calavo for more than 40 years, said, “Our effort is to continue to have a good customer list — and we’ve got a really good one — so we want to be able to produce the amount of fruit that those customers require of us, and not go too far overproducing the amount of avocados that we have. We want to make sure that we are controlling our inventories and keeping fruit fresh and not getting ourselves into overages on the production side that we don’t have a good home for.”

Calavo’s customers are heavily involved in “our V.I.P. ripe program now and also our consumer bag program,” he said. “Those two programs continue to grow, and obviously Mexican avocados play an important role in supplying those programs.”

Calavo brings all of its avocados from Mexico into the United States through Laredo, TX. “We have upgraded our operation in Laredo,” Wedin said. “We’ve got cooling capacity. We’ve got a couple of our good people there running the operation, and all of the computers are set up, so that is an additional shipping point for us.”

The Laredo facility does not have bagging or ripening capabilities. “That is all done in Dallas or here in Santa Paula or in southern New Jersey,” near Philadelphia, he said. “We move fruit out of the packinghouse in Mexico just as fast as we can,” and when it gets to Laredo, “it either goes to a customer or moves out to one of those three locations.”