The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service is working to provide data to officials in South Korea that it hopes will result in a reversal of a decision to ban potato exports from Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Henry DeBlouw lets out a stifled chuckle when he says, “I’m Henry the Fifth,” but his job as vice president of operations for Mike Pirrone Produce Inc. is a serious matter.

His father, Henry IV, is known by his nickname, Butch. The DeBlouws bought Mike Pirrone Produce this past winter from Joe Pirrone, whose father founded the Capac, MI-based operation in 1951.

Avenal, CA-based Keenan Farms Inc. announced the hiring of BETH SEQUEIRA to its sales and marketing team on July 24. In her new position at the company, Ms. Sequeira will work to expand domestic and export sales of Keenan pistachios.

“We’ve got new products in our guacamole category,” said Tracey Altman, vice president of brand marketing for Fresherized Foods Inc. in Saginaw, TX, in an interview with The Produce News July 25. Fresherized is the manufacturer of “Wholly Guacamole, rated by Nielsen as the leading guacamole brand in the United States.

The new guacamole products are a home-style guacamole and a new Avocado Ranch-style snack pack.

As with the California avocado industry in general, Del Rey Avocado Co. Inc. in Fallbrook, CA, has a bigger crop of California avocados this year than last year, and as of late July, there was a good portion of that crop yet to go. “We are going to have a very big volume right into October,” said President Bob Lucy, July 26. “We are going to have a very big August and September, with very good quality fruit to carry us through the end of summer and into the fall.”

The first several weeks of the 2012 grape harvest in California's San Joaquin Valley went about as perfectly as one could wish in many regards, with excellent quality, exceptionally good movement and reasonable returns, according to growers and marketers.

The season was also running considerably earlier on most varieties than it had for the two previous years, but some growers feel that an extended stretch of hot weather that began around the first of August could delay some of the later varieties.