Longtime industry veteran Andy Economou remembers the day well: “Vladimir Tudor came to me in November of 1992 and said, ‘I want you to sell my deal.’ We made the deal and I have been coming to Coachella ever since. As far as I am concerned you have to be there to do it right, so every year I bring out some sales people with me and we spend two months in California. Believe me it’s a great break from Philadelphia. We enjoy it.”

Mr. Economou is the general manager of Unifrutti of America, which is based in Philadelphia and has long represented a number of overseas deals, including Chilean and Brazilian grapes, citrus from South Africa, and clementines from Peru, to name a few of the commodities.

He also has great familiarity with California. “I set up the Superior Farming deal in 1973,” he said of the agricultural venture of the long-ago Superior Oil Co. “They then sold to Mobil Oil, which didn’t want to farm anymore and sold Superior to Sun World. But that was a long time ago,” he added.

His reentry into California came in that 1993 season with Tudor Ranch, which operates out of Mecca, CA.

“When we started with them, they had 300,000 boxes. We’ve helped them build that up quite a bit,” he said. “This year we should have more than 1.2 million cartons, which puts us about third out of Coachella.”

Tudor’s offerings will be led by Flame Seedless and Sugraones. “It’s like manna from heaven for Coachella,” he said of the Sugraone variety.

He said it is easier and cheaper to grow and a better grape than other varieties. He said Coachella Valley’s grape industry was in a downward spiral until the Sugraone was able to be planted.

Today, production of Sugraones continues to increase as does production of other new varieties.

“The Scarlet Royal is a great grape for Coachella. It’s going to allow Coachella to get into the export market,” Mr. Economou added.

He said this year Unifrutti will do some export sales of that variety to Australia and New Zealand, and in the coming years, as its volume increases, the export market will be an excellent outlet for Coachella Valley growers and shippers, who grow that variety. Last year, Coachella produced about 110,000 boxes of Scarlet Royals. More are expected this year, and at least for the next several years volume will continue to increase.

Unifrutti expects the Flame Seedless from the California desert to end by the middle of June, followed by the end of the Sugraone deal around July 8 and the conclusion of the Scarlet Royal crop in the middle of July. At that point, Unifrutti will transition its grapes sales effort to Delano, where the company represents about 300,000 cartons of grapes from that San Joaquin Valley district.