Champion Produce Sales welcomes holiday flurry of activity
Champion Produce Sales welcomes holiday flurry of activity
Record cold in the Treasure Valley of Idaho-Eastern Oregon has done nothing to slow the staff at Champion Produce Sales in Parma, ID, where the holidays have set the pace.
“We love the holidays,” Champion President John Wong said in mid-November. “In continuing the 60-year tradition of supplying our delicious Spanish Sweets to consumers, we are really looking forward to the holiday season. Our onions are such a common ingredient in so many holiday and winter ‘comfort food’ recipes and entire meals, and to keep that going we ship more than 100 loads weekly from our Idaho and Utah facilities.”
John and Nancy Wong of Champion Produce Sales in Parma, ID.Wong said the sudden onset of cold the second week of November, caused by the polar vortex, was taken in stride at Champion.
“I am personally old school,” he said. “We always called it the ‘month of November’ when I was growing up. But it has created an earlier-than-expected demand on refrigerated trucks, and this, combined with the normal holiday truck demand, has prompted us to recommend our customers order on the early side. This helps ensure they have the inventory needed coming into the holidays.”
Champion strives to provide on-time deliveries, and transportation “continues to be an important component of our success.”
On Nov. 16, when the thermometer registered -5 degrees outside, Champion was utilizing its own insulated storages, he said, “to maintain the perfect inside temperatures needed for long-term storage.”
He added, “The quality is outstanding, and we have exceptionally large sizing. With the technology of heated and refrigerated storages, we will have onions available through April 2015.”
Demand is increasing for red Spanish Sweets, which Wong said is attributable to the “visual plate appeal” of the bright onions.
He said, “The saying that ‘you taste it with your eyes first’ must have something to it. Our onions are savory sweet, which makes them the perfect addition to many dishes. And they can be eaten raw, cooked, fried, dried or roasted.”
Champion offers packaging from two-pound mesh bags to 2,000-pound totes, with the most common packages being 25-pound and 50-pound bags and cartons of yellow, red and whites.
“I would like to wish all Happy Holidays, and from our family farms to your families’ tables, we invite you to taste what we call the ‘perfection of onionlicious.’”
