For more than a decade, Eclipse Berry Farms has been one of the leaders in the California grape tomato deal

With its fields in the Oxnard Plains area of Ventura County and its sales office on the Westside of Los Angeles, it has carved out a nice niche selling only grape-type tomatoes in that category. Salesman Rick Hearst said the 2014 season for the firm is shaping up to be a fairly typical year. On Thursday, May 29, he told The Produce News that the firm’s production was about two weeks away from starting.

“We will go from June to November,” said Hearst. “Our volume comes in August.”

That’s not necessarily by design but a product of Mother Nature, said the longtime veteran on the Los Angeles produce scene.

“Everything looks great this year,” he said. “We’ve had no rain, no heat problems. The crop is coming along very well.”

Hearst’s only minor complaint is a familiar refrain. “There seem to be a lot more shippers with grape tomatoes than there used to be,” he said.

When Eclipse Berry Farms, which also grows and ships strawberries as its name implies, diversified into the relatively new grape tomato deal, the firm didn’t have much competition. It grew its acreage to a manageable level, concentrated on the red grape tomato variety, was one of the larger players in that category and developed a strong following. The tomato category has seemingly exploded over the past decade with more players and more SKUs than ever before, including golden and yellow varieties of grape tomatoes.

While Eclipse still produces its grape tomatoes in the field and focuses on the red varieties, several greenhouse operations have entered the California deal and offer good competition. With more volume, of course, the longtime players like Eclipse have to settle for generally lower f.o.b. prices. “If there are too many tomatoes, it’s easy to mess up this market,” he said, indicating that the demand for grape tomatoes can be altered very quickly.

But in any event, Hearst and Stuart Gilfenbain, Hearst’s longtime colleague on the Eclipse sales desk, were looking forward to the start of the season to fill the orders of their customers. They sell mostly to chains, offering this specialty tomato in several different configurations.

The standard pack is 12 one-pint containers in a corrugated carton, but Eclipse also packs in RPCs (returnable plastic containers), preferred by some retailers, and in bulk containers for other customers.