RJO Produce Marketing Inc., a fruit broker in Fresno, CA, services customers in three primary areas, according to Clint Lucas, who does sales and inspection for the company. Those areas are category managing, buying and inspection. “We continue to do what the customer needs and asks of us,” he said.

According to the company’s website, RJO is “unlike the traditional agriculture commodity broker. We offer a wide variety of services to help our clients work smart and maximize their profitability.”

The company is involved in a wide array of commodities from grapes to melons and from citrus to strawberries. Tree fruit from California has always been a mainstay for the company during the summer season.

“We expect a good year” for the California summer fruit deal this year, Lucas said in an interview with The Produce News April 21. “From the early fruit we have seen, quality has been good. From talking to shippers, we are looking for a good quality year, and hopefully volume is close to normal, which it sounds like it is going to be” at least on peaches and nectarines, both white and yellow. Plums, on the other hand, may be on the light side for some shippers, while others are saying they have a normal plum crop. “It is a mixed bag on the plum volume,” he said.

Starting dates for the early stone fruit varieties are, in general, anywhere from a week to two weeks earlier than normal, with the average being about seven to 10 days early, Lucas said. Shippers are “pushing for Memorial Day ads on the yellow flesh and the white flesh.” But with plums, they expect to have good availability post-Memorial Day.

Some Snow Angel peaches, Honey May nectarines and early apricots were already loading, he said. “We are going to have Super Rich here” starting the week of April 28, “which is a good conventional yellow peach.” By the week of May 5, Spring Flame yellow peaches, “which is the first conditioned variety that most guys do,” should be started, as well as the Zee Fire nectarine. By the week of May 12, there should be good volumes of conditioned peaches and nectarines available.

In plums, the first varieties should start up mid- to late May, but “your better varieties and your conditioned varieties like the Black Splendor and the Yummy Beaut will be closer to the week of June 2.”

One of the big developments at RJO over the last couple of years, and still a work in progress, has been “our hand held application” for fruit inspectors, integrated with “our bird dog scoring system” enabling inspectors to quantify quality and transmit the information real time to the RJO office and database, and to customers, Lucas said.

At RJO, “our core competency [is] on-ground representation in the field,” Lucas said in a previous interview. “We are real excited to be transitioning into this app and using it for our day-to-day inspections. “During the tree fruit season, we will be able to use this app, and for any of our customers that we do inspections for, we will be able to send them real time data straight from our hand-helds” on such things as varieties, pack dates, lots and inspection scores.