Bland Farms has been importing onions from Peru for more than 25 years and is one of the companies on the forefront of packing, distributing, and marketing them. 

Twenty years ago, I started my first job out of college and 12 years ago next month, I entered the produce industry. When recently speaking to a colleague about how different the workplace is now for college graduates vs. when I entered, she asked me, “If you could give advice to your younger self, what would you say?”

Each summer, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. team members across the country enthusiastically participate in the company’s Summer of a Million Smiles employee volunteer program, donating their time to give back to others in the communities where they live and work.

Wednesday, Oct. 19 is the date of this year’s Petal It Forward, the Society of American Florist’s international goodwill initiative, where on one day thousands of floral industry participants hand two flowers or bouquets to an unsuspecting stranger, urging them to keep one and share the other with someone else.

After a couple of false starts, the corpse flower at the University of California, Santa Cruz has delivered what many were waiting for, on Aug. 2.

It fully bloomed with the overwhelming stinkiness that it got its name from. The Central Coast does not have a tropical climate, the corpse flower is a tropical rainforest plant so, it waited until things heated up before it decided to bloom.

Henry Lee Giclas III, who retired two years ago after a career of unflinching devotion to the betterment of the produce industry, died on Friday, Aug. 5, after a short battle with cancer.

Mr. Giclas, who spent the entirety of his produce industry career with Western Growers, was born in Socorro, NM, in 1959 and retired in 2020 in nearby Albuquerque. In between, he lived an adventurous life that took him around the world and through several professions.