In anticipation of onion sales ramping up for the 2010 holiday season, Nancy Carter, owner of Parma, ID-based Savory Sweet LLC, said her sales and marketing company has seen its biggest gains this year in retail.

Ms. Carter, who launched Savory Sweet in April 2010, has more than 25 years' experience in produce sales. For the past decade she has focused on Spanish Sweets from Idaho-Eastern Oregon’s Treasure Valley. She noted the goal of Savory Sweet is to "align good customers with good growers and packers."

"Movement is just so-so," Paul Dolan said of the Red River Valley potato deal on Nov. 16. “It's not as brisk as we hoped it would be for Thanksgiving.”

Speaking from his Grand Forks, ND, office, where he is manager of Associated Potato Growers Inc., Mr. Dolan indicated, “Markets are holding but the demand is so-so. And the truck situation is really tight. It hasn’t been this bad in five years for trucks, so transportation is causing some of the lack of movement, as well.”

Over the past decade Bland Farms LLC has expanded from its Glennville, GA, headquarters to locations throughout the world, adding new sweet onion- growing areas to its network as it has become one of the nation's larger purveyors of Vidalia onions and one of the larger in the onion category.

This year, that product line has been expanded with the addition of the EverMild, a sweet onion from the Pacific Northwest. Bland partnered with River Point Farms in Hermiston, OR, to add the newly developed onion to its lineup.

A late-running Idaho Russet Burbank potato harvest created a series of events making this potato shipping season "a little strange," according to David Haun, president of Haun Potato Co., based in Shawnee Mission, KS.

Sweet Onion Trading Co., headquartered in Melbourne, FL, markets a variety of domestically grown and imported sweet onions throughout the year. "We are active in Chile, Peru, Mexico, Vidalia, California, Nevada and Washington," President Barry Rogers told The Produce News Nov. 14.

He went on to say that difficult weather during the growing season affected all regions with the exception of California during 2010. “All of the issues had to do with too much rain,” he stated. Conditions have affected sizing and per- acre yield.

L&M Cos. Inc., headquartered in Raleigh, NC, and with branch offices in 12 other locations around the country, is a vertically integrated supplier of an assortment of fresh fruits and vegetables, functioning variously as grower, packer, shipper, marketer, broker, distributor, importer and exporter.

Potatoes and onions constitute one of the company's four core commodity categories — the others being apples, pears and cherries; limes, mangos and Texas-grown produce; and a wide array of vegetables.