Special varieties of stone fruit are very much the stock in trade for Family Tree Farms Marketing LLC in Reedley, CA, and this year the company has several new varieties either just coming on line or coming into fuller production that merit special mention, according to Dovey Plain, marketing coordinator.

In addition, Family Tree Farms now has a full line of white flesh nectarines, selected for their flavor, something “that we have been working on for several years,” to complement the company’s strong white flesh peach program, Ms. Plain said.

The white nectarines are “something we want to tout a little bit,” she said. While white nectarines are not new to the company, Family Tree Farms has been working for some time on selecting varieties with the right flavor profiles, getting them planted and getting the orchards “up and producing.” This year “we are finally there. This nectarine lineup that we feel just really great about is at maturity. We’ve got good volume, and we are super proud of it.”

The varieties all have “pearl” in their names, such as Pearl Princess and Grand Pearl, Ms. Plain said. “For us, it has to meet a certain flavor criteria to go in that Pearl lineup.”

Family Tree Farms refers to the line of Pearl nectarine varieties as “our string of Pearls,” he said.

In yellow flesh nectarines, Family Tree Farms has been going through much the same process over the past few years. The company was a bit hesitant to get into yellow flesh nectarines, because “we knew that the yellow flesh field was pretty crowded and competitive,” Ms. Plain said. With a commitment to selecting fruit that could be regarded as “special,” it was not readily apparent that yellow nectarines could meet that criterion.

But as Family Tree Farms, which has contact with breeders around the world, was looking at new varieties of stone fruit, “always looking for the best” fruit varieties available, “we would come across these yellow nectarine varieties that would just blow us away,” Ms. Plain said. “We thought, ‘We’ve got to grow these!’“ So — in a story very much like that for the white flesh nectarines — the company began putting together a line of yellow nectarines. “We’ve been working on getting the exclusive rights to grow them in North America and getting them planted,” she said. “Now it is bearing fruit, literally, so we’ve got this great lineup of yellow nectarines that goes through the summer.”

They are not “sub-acid” varieties, which “gained, I guess, a bad reputation” because they were sweet but “really didn’t have any nectarine flavor to them.” Rather, “we call these balanced acid,” she said. They have high Brix but with enough acidity and other flavor components to make them taste like nectarines, “so it is the best of both worlds.”

In the peach category, Family Tree Farms has a couple of new yellow flesh flat peach varieties that qualify as “special.” While most donut or Saturn-type peaches are white flesh, Family Tree Farms owner Dave Jackson “discovered in Europe that a lot of what is being planted there is yellow flesh flat peaches,” Ms. Plain said.

Last year, Family Tree Farms introduced a flat yellow variety called Peach Pie. “This one actually isn’t from overseas. It is bred domestically,” she said. “It is unique in that it has no red blush on it at all.” The skin and the flesh are the same color, so “it has an intriguing appearance, but it also has the flavor to back it up.”

Last year, Peach Pie went out “in limited numbers to just a few customers, and they started going crazy over it,” she said. “We got behind it with a marketing campaign,” knowing that today’s consumers expect red on their peaches. “It has a great story,” as its parentage is “an old school canning variety” and it inherited that variety’s “dense, creamy texture and the perfect peachy flavor,” tasting like “something in Grandma’s backyard.”

Family Tree Farms calls the variety an heirloom peach, which is justified because it has “the parentage to back it up,” she said. “We developed an old style fruit label package that goes on the clamshells and some point-of-sales materials.” Its season is late June through mid-July.

Family Tree Farms also has another yellow flat peach that comes off toward the end of August, called Angel Fire. “It has a more traditional look and flavor,” except for being flat, she said. It is large in size and uniform in shape, without the bulge to one side that many Saturn-style peaches exhibit.

The company has a couple of new Aprium varieties that come off in late August, that have “a perfect blend” of plum and apricot flavors, she said. One is called Rose, for its “very beautiful pink color,” and the other, with very similar characteristics but a little different color, is called Purple Rose.

While Family Tree Farms has “no debuts this year” in plumcots, “we do have a couple that are in the pipeline over the next couple of years.” However, some plumcot varieties the company has had in production for three or four years are now “really hitting their stride,” she said. One is called Eagle Egg, and another is called Plumagranate. Both have deep red flesh with the kind of great flavor that “tends to get people really excited.”