This season, Organics Unlimited, headquartered in San Diego, is moving bananas into the Philadelphia market. “We just started going into Philadelphia a month-and-a-half ago,” said President Mayra Velazquez de Leon in late May. “We are shipping a container a week to test the waters.” The bananas are being shipped under the company’s “GROW” label. “There seems to be an interest in this,” she said.

Velazquez de Leon’s family has been in the banana business for four generations. Her father exported the first commercially grown organic bananas to the United States in 1974. Velazquez de Leon and her husband, Manuel, founded Organics Unlimited in 2000 to continue farming operations and assume responsibility for exports.

Today, the company is one of the larger suppliers growing and packing organic bananas for sale to customers in North American and Japan. According to Velazquez de Leon, most of the bananas exported come from the company’s farming operations and other organic farms in Mexico.

Bananas from Mexico are harvested, packed and loaded into trucks at the farms and trucked directly to the United States for distribution. The fruit crosses the border at Otay Mesa, CA, and is warehoused in San Diego.

“The time from harvest to arrival in the U.S. is about four days, compared with weeks that it often takes for bananas to arrive in the U.S. when they are shipped in containers on ships,” Velazquez de Leon said. Bananas moving to Philly are reaching the East Coast via ocean freight.

This year, Velazquez de Leon said acreage has been added to the existing farm in the state of Michoacan. “This translates to a low in winter of an additional 3,840 cases per week, and a summer high of 6,860 cases of bananas per week,” she said.

She said the 2014 production has been going well, even as hurricane season was ramping up in the Gulf of Mexico. “There’s not much you can do to prepare for Mother Nature,” she laughed.

Velazquez de Leon is looking for good production “and incredible quality. Bananas like warm, humid conditions for growing. During the coolest part of the winter, production is slowed because temperatures drop a bit lower at night, and the growing process is just slower. However, we have been fortunate this year to not have had any chill damage, and we are now at the height of our year-round production.”

The mainstay of the company’s volume is the organic Cavendish variety. But organic plantains and organic red bananas are also imported into the United States.

Organics Unlimited plans to bring its first shipment of organic bananas from Peru into the United States toward the end of June. “It’s a big deal going on,” Velazquez de Leon said.

Organic bananas are marketed under the “Organics Unlimited” label. Product exported to Japan is marketed under the “BioFruit” label.

The company’s “GROW” label, which carries a small surcharge, was created in 2005 and supports educational, dental and vision programs within communities in which the bananas are grown.

Organics Unlimited is certified through Fair-Trade International, and bananas are also marketed under the “Fair Trade” label, which generates funds for worker programs.