PALM SPRINGS, CA -- Not surprisingly, food safety was the dominant topic of conversation at the United Fresh Produce Association's FreshTech conference, held here April 25-28.

Salinas, CA-based Colorful Harvest is now the exclusive grower-shipper for Green Giant Fresh melons nationwide.

The deal, which had been in the works for about a year, was completed Thursday morning, May 3. Colorful Harvest will begin shipping cantaloupe and honeydew out of Tampa, FL, and Brawley, CA, beginning the week of May 7, according to Doug Ranno, Colorful Harvest's chief operating officer and general manager. Other California shipping points will include Mendota and Firebaugh, and melons also will ship from Yuma and Maricopa in Arizona.

As the supermarket industry conforms to business culture in the 21st century, it is forced to adjust to contemporary ways of doing business, encounter unique forms of competition, face never-before-known challenges and initiate new, sometimes stringent, regulations. And no companies are more aware of the changing landscape of food retailing than organizations that have existed for decades.

River Point Farms and CIC Partners have created a large, new onion company.

The merger of American Onion Inc. and Rivergate Farms LLC created the new River Point Farms, with a major interest purchased by Dallas-based CIC Partners, a mid-market private equity firm. This transaction places River Point Farms among America's larger growers and processors of yellow, red and sweet onions, expected to produce over 400 million pounds of onions this year.

Price Chopper officials in Schenectady, NY, have announced the addition of more than 1,000 new natural and organic items to an already substantial array of lifestyle products in the chain's 115 stores in six Northeastern states.

Overall reported California new potato acreage in Kern County has dropped just slightly more than 1 percent to 9,213 acres planted in 2007 from 9,314 acres planted in 2006, according to published data from the Kern County Shippers Association.

One major Kern County packingshed does not publicly release its acreage and therefore is not included in the totals.