TULARE, CA — Sundale Sales Inc., here, expects to ship close to four million boxes of grapes this year, as the company’s volume continues to grow.

There were increases at the beginning of the season with Suraones and Flames. “We doubled our Flame acreage over last year” as “new vineyards came into play,” said President Sean Stockton.

Brady Johnston, Todd Kinosian, Pete Giotta, Aram Kinosian, Sean Stockton, Christy Salazar and Michael Astorga of Sundale Sales in front of the company’s newly-expanded facility. (Photo courtesy of Sundale Sales Inc.)Much of the company’s volume growth this year will be in the late deal, notably with a major increase in the Autumn Royal green seedless variety “for the back end,” he said. Autumn King is “a mainstay of what we do here.” In addition, “we do have some new Red Globe production coming in for our international business.”

Sundale Sales is the marketing arm of Sundale Vineyards and is continuing its expansion of its physical facilities to accommodate a partnership between Mr. Stockton and the Kinosian family that owns Sundale Vineyards.

The company recently undertook an extensive expansion of its cold storage facilities, addition of a house pack facility and construction of a new office complex here.

“Our increased volume forced the expansion of the cold storage,” Mr. Stockton said. “And we are not done yet. There will probably be another expansion yet to come for additional cold storage and pre-cooling space” as the company’s grape volume continues to grow.

The attached 5,500-square-foot office complex was completed earlier this year. “We moved into it last February,” Mr. Stockton said. The sales and marketing company and the international division are housed on the second level, while the farming operation’s offices and the accounting offices are located downstairs.

The sales team consists of Mr. Stockton, Pete Giotta and Brady Johnston on the domestic side with Michael Astorga as export and import manager and Christy Salazar as office manager.

The entire design concept “was the vision of [owners] Aram and Todd Kinosian and it turned out to be one of the finest sales facilities of any company” in the industry, Mr. Stockton said. “It turned out nice, and we are pretty proud of it.”

The new house-pack facility will give Sundale “the opportunity, in a controlled atmosphere, to pack multicolored packages — bicolor and tricolor — for the middle land late part of the season,” he said. Harvested fruit can be held under climate-controlled conditions until time for packing, rather than packing in advance and putting the packed fruit into cold storage. Instead of shipping “something that has sat in the cold storage for multiple weeks, you can take it out of the tubs and pack it” just before shipment.

The house-pack facility facilitates the packing of fixed weight bags or clamshells, he said.

The entire facility “is kept immaculate,” Mr. Stockton continued. “When auditors come here to audit for GlobalGAP Primus certification of the facility, we always rank at the very top of their scoring cards because of the way that the operation is run and the way the facility is kept.”

The new facility, including the house-pack facility was designed to conform to the requirements of GlobalGAP certification. “We pack for both Europe and Asia in the house-pack facility, so it needed to be built with those certifications in mind,” he said. “Everything is easier if you can do it the right way the first time,” rather than having to retrofit.