Fresh dates in general, and Medjools in particular, are gaining in popularity. Demand is on the rise. In response to that growth, the date industry in the United States has been putting in new plantings, and production is increasing.

“Across the board [throughout] the date industry, the volume is increasing,” said Ben Antongiovanni, sales manager at Atlas Produce & Distribution Inc. in Bakersfield, CA, in an interview with The Produce News. “The date market is booming right now, and there are more plantings coming into production, so the volume is definitely increasing, but the demand is there. And most of the growers are out promoting Medjool dates really hard, so it is increasing demand across the world.”

The Asian market, for example, “is really picking up, and the Australian market is a big market for dates,” he said.

In the United States, “there has been some tremendous growth here in the last three or four years as more and more people get familiar with Medjool dates,” Antongiovanni continued. “The biggest hurdle” is just getting people to try them, “because once they try them, they love them and want to come back for more.”

Atlas Produce is a grower and marketer of California-grown Medjool dates, and “our volume will be up about 20 percent” this year, Antongiovanni said.

With that increased volume, “we have added onto our cold storage,” he said. Last year, Atlas “basically built a new state-of-the-art” cold storage facility, and “we are adding onto it right now.”

Due to the company’s post-harvest handling practices and technology, “we have excellent fruit year-round,” he said, “and a lot of that has to do with the state-of-the-art cold storage we built.”

The company began harvesting Medjools Aug. 22 this year, “so we have been going for about two weeks,” he said. “In the beginning, the fruit comes in a little bit slow, but now this week we have a lot of fruit coming in, and the quality is excellent. The size of the dates is very large this year, so we will have consistently large Medjool dates all year long.”

Unlike some other date shippers in the United States who may have fruit grown “in different regions like Arizona or Mexico,” 100 percent of Atlas’s fruit is grown in California, Antongiovanni said. ”We joined the California Grown marketing campaign, so we are promoting California Grown on our packaging, which gives consumers a piece of mind that they are getting a quality piece of fruit.”

Last year, Atlas introduced some new packaging, “and that has been well received in the market,” said Antongiovanni. It consists of a shallow, rectangular clear plastic tub with a triangle-shaped label on one corner of the lid, and it is designed to give increased visibility to the product. “We have had some retailers who went out with our new packaging and have seen like 500 percent increase in sales over the previous year,” attributable to the new packaging combined with “our excellent quality.”

Atlas also sells dates in one-pound and two-pound square tubs. The two-pound tubs are “a great clubs store item,” and the one-pounder is “our best-selling item” because it is “at the right price point and merchandises well on the shelf,” he said.

Both pack styles carry the company’s “Caramel Naturel” label.

In addition to whole fresh Medjool dates, Atlas’s two other “big sellers” are date coconut rolls and date almond rolls, Antongiovanni said. They have been around about 30 years but have been gaining in popularity recently. They have “really taken off in the last two years.”