“This will be our earliest season start in Hronis’ 69-year history,” said Pete Hronis, vice president of sales and marketing for Hronis Inc. in Delano, CA, a family-owned table grape growing, packing and shipping company, in a written statement to The Produce News June 4. “We are very happy to announce we will begin shipping our grapes 10 days to two weeks earlier than normal this year.”

Fresh grapes are “a big part of what Crown Jewels does in the summertime, along with melons and apples and pears and pomegranates,” said Atomic Torosian, a partner in Crown Jewels Produce LLC in Fresno, CA. “We generally do about a million and a half boxes of grapes out of California, and that number will be pretty much the same” for the 2014 season.

Being early with a crop can be a desirable thing when it hits a marketing window, but not when it comes in on top of an already glutted market. That is what happened at the start of the Central California onion deal this year, but growers were confident that it was only a temporary situation and prices would soon firm.

Stevco Inc., which is headquartered in Los Angeles and has branch offices in Nogales, AZ, and in Coachella and Bakersfield, CA, will once again have an increase in production of both Flame seedless grapes and Sugraone green seedless grapes during the early part of the season in California’s San Joaquin Valley, according to Jared Lane, vice president of sales and marketing.

The company had additional acreage in production in those varieties for the 2013 season. For 2014, Stevco will again “have a little bit added volume on both Sugraones and Flames,” Lane said May 29.

Telesis Onion Co. Inc.. in Five Points, CA, which produces red, yellow and white onions in the Huron and Five Points area, packs its products for both foodservice and retail customers.

“We do all boxes and all consumer bags,” Mike Smythe, a salesman with the company, said in a May 29 interview with The Produce News.

Last year, Telesis purchased a new Volm bagging machine to meet increased demand from retailers for consumer bags and also increased its stickering capacity.

For more than a decade, Eclipse Berry Farms has been one of the leaders in the California grape tomato deal

With its fields in the Oxnard Plains area of Ventura County and its sales office on the Westside of Los Angeles, it has carved out a nice niche selling only grape-type tomatoes in that category. Salesman Rick Hearst said the 2014 season for the firm is shaping up to be a fairly typical year. On Thursday, May 29, he told The Produce News that the firm’s production was about two weeks away from starting.