“It’s a seven-year cycle from the time you plan until you get significant production,” Ryan said. “It’s a big investment and takes a pretty big commitment, and the owners of our company have been making that commitment for decades. Each year, we have new production coming in or acreage that is increasing as the trees get older.”
SunDate is also heavily involved in growing organic dates and is seeing the same double-digit growth in that category. Its parent company, Anthony Vineyards is headquartered in Bakersfield, CA, and is the largest organic table grape grower in the state and brought its organic knowledge to the date side of things.
“Organic is a big part of what we do, and the demand for organic dates is larger year after year,” Ryan said. “Our largest customers are in organic domestically and we’re starting to see that transition happen oversees, though not at the same pace as in the U.S.”
The company is extremely bullish on what the upcoming date season holds.
“We are coming into what’s really a quality crop, a little bit later than normal, but growing conditions have been ideal,” Ryan said. “Last year we had some weather issues, so it was a bit of a short crop, and there has been a lot of pressure to build back up the pipeline. We’re starting to see some relief from that.”
The date season is year-round from a sales standpoint. The Medjool season starts in late August and runs into mid- or late October, while the Deglet Noor harvest starts in early October and runs through the first part of December.
“What used to be something that was limited to sales starting around Thanksgiving, and which in the past we’d want to be out of the crop no later than Easter and Passover because there wasn’t demand in summer and fall, has morphed into a year-round item,” Ryan said. “We freeze the fruit at harvest and pull from the storage all 12 months.”
Ramadan has also been a big factor in the popularity of dates, especially with the way it travels through the calendar. In 2025, it will run from Feb. 28 to March 30.
In a normal year, the transition from the old to new crop would be indistinguishable, but this year was not a normal year because of what was an empty cooler, though that won’t be a problem after this year’s successful offering.
“The biggest driver around Medjool dates has been exposure,” Ryan said. “Once people realized what dates are and see how versatile they are, they really evolved a great deal.”
Growing in the Coachella Valley is ideal, Ryan noted, due to the region’s hot and dry temperatures (as high as 120 degrees in the summer), plentiful underground water from the Colorado River, and a lack of rain.
“The climate mimics the Middle East, which is the traditional date growing region,” he said. “This is really the perfect climate to grow dates.”
