Saven Corp., headquartered in Savannah, GA, has been producing flat yellow Vidalia-type sweet onions for around 26 years under the “Oso Sweet” brand. It now offers “Oso Sweet” onions year-round, with production in various Northern and Southern Hemisphere growing areas. “This is our second year in California in the Central Valley deal,” said Mark Breimeister, a shareholder in the company and national sales director.

Acreage is up this year in the company’s Central California program, he said. “I would guess, this season, we will do about 70,000 packages.” That is expected to continue to increase in coming seasons.

The company is also producing onions this year in Brawley in California’s southern desert. The Brawley deal started around May 1. “We will end that program here the end of June,” overlapping with the Central California crop, which was expected to start about mid-June and continue “roughly through September.”

California is a major part of the company’s year-round onion operation, particularly for customers in the western half of the country, Breimeister said. Running through spring and summer, it roughly coincides with the company’s Vidalia program out of Georgia, which normally runs from April through September.

The company also produces Oso Sweet onions in Peru starting in July and continuing into January, and in Chile starting in January and continuing “till March, when we go to South Texas.” The South Texas production, in the McAllen area, “bridges the gap between the Southern Hemisphere” and the start of the Vidalia and California deals.

A great deal of fresh produce grown in Mexico crosses into the United States at McAllen. Currently, however, all the “Oso Sweet” onions from McAllen are grown on the Texas side of the border and not in Mexico. But “we are talking about” also growing in Mexico and crossing at McAllen, he said.

“What we do in the Central Valley” in California, as in other growing areas, is to grow and pack “a flat sweet [yellow] onion identical to the seed that we grow in Vidalia,” Breimeister said. “It is pretty much the same flat yellow onion that we do everywhere — the Oso Sweet onion. That’s what put us on the map, and that’s what we do.”

Outside of that, “we broker onions of other types,” he added.

The company packs the Oso Sweets in “consumer packs, high-graphic consumer bags, bins, whatever the customer wants, including cartons,” he said. “This is pretty much a retail-driven deal.”

So far, the California program has been “a very good deal for us,” Breimeister said. “We have gotten key national accounts in the program, and we see tremendous growth opportunity in the California flat sweet onion program.”