Donny Lucy

Robert (Bob) Lucy, president of Del Rey Avocado Co. Inc. in Fallbrook, CA, now has two sons working with him full time in the sales department at Del Rey.

Donny Lucy, who had been playing professional baseball for the White Sox and helping out with sales at Del Rey during the baseball off-season, “is now a full-time salesperson” at Del Rey, Mr. Lucy told The Produce News March 5.

Donny came on board last fall following the baseball season, and his father told The Produce News last October, “I think [he] will be on board now full time.” That has now been confirmed.

This will be the first season that Donny has been on the company’s sales desk during the entire California season.

“Donny’s responsibilities are mostly east of the Mississippi — Chicago and east,” Mr. Lucy said.

A Dec. 16, 2011, article on SouthSideSox.com paid a glowing tribute to Donny Lucy, calling his retirement from Major League Baseball “the most important White Sox Story of the off-season.” The article described Donny as “a key performer. His career line is excellent for a catcher. But it’s not just his superlative on-field skills that mattered. As a Stanford graduate, he brought a Greg Maddux-esque cerebral approach to the game. Scouts raved about his ability to handle pitching staffs, which is no surprise considering he is a summa cum laude graduate of the White Stag Leadership Camp. His mere presence inspired all those around him.”

Donny joins his brother, Patrick Lucy, in sales. Patrick’s primary focus will be on organic avocado sales, which are becoming an increasingly important part of the company’s business. Mr. Lucy’s partner, Joe Reaves, who had been doing some sales will now do less of that and will be concentrating on logistics, food-safety certification with Primus and the company’s preconditioning program, Mr. Lucy said.

Del Rey has a strong presence in the organic avocado business, Mr. Lucy said. For the 2012 season, “we have increased in our volume of the organic. A number of our younger organic groves are getting a little older, so we are going to have increased volume. It is a big program for us. It has been successful,” he said, and “it is really growing.”

The harvest of the 2012 California avocado crop at Del Rey started to get going as of early March. “We have been doing California fruit in January and February,” Mr. Lucy said. But to date, most of what has been harvested “has been motivated by cultural things, not so much by demand,” as there has been abundant fruit in the market from Mexico and Chile.

“But as the Chilean volume, for us, is basically wrapping up this week, we are transitioning everybody” from the Rocky Mountains to California. Meanwhile, in the Northeast, “we are still going very strong with Mexican avocados,” he said.

One difference in the California season this year will be that “we will have more [California] fruit in September than we did last year,” Mr. Lucy said. The company’s heaviest months for California fruit are expected to be from May into September.

Del Rey went later with California fruit last year than some other shippers and plans to do so again this year, setting up programs between specific retailers and specific growers, enabling those retail customers to carry California fruit into October.