“We had an exceptional harvest this year,” in the Bard Valley, with “a great yield,” Erin Hanagan-Muths, marketing manager at DatePac LLC in Yuma, AZ, said in an interview with The Produce News.

Grower members of the Bard Valley Medjool Date Growers Association own DatePac and market their dates under the “Bard Valley Natural Delights” brand which was introduced two years ago for use on all of their Medjool dates and date rolls. The dates are grown in the vicinity of Yuma and in nearby Bard, CA, on either side of the lower Colorado River. Sales for Bard Valley Medjools are handled by DatePac, which also does most of the packing for the association’s members.

A ‘Naughty or Nice?’ themed retail display for ‘Bard Valley Natural Delights’ dates. (Photo courtesy of Bard Valley Medjool Date Growers Association)The harvest started around mid-August this year, which was about a week early. “We had great weather” this year, she said. “We were very lucky this year, because all of that monsoonal moisture that everybody saw on the news hit Phoenix and hit the Imperial Valley in California,” but “it went right around us.”

Bard Valley growers “have been planting new groves for quite a few years now, and those groves are all starting to come to maturation, so our harvest is increasing by about 20 percent year over year in volume,” she said. The fruit coming off the trees this year was large and beautiful. “We attribute that to our grower practices which we stand behind as being second to none.”

Demand for Medjool dates is strong all year round but especially so during the holiday season, according to Hanagan-Muths.

“We look at Nielsen” data for retail Medjool sales on a regular basis, she said, and “as we tack our 52 week data” year after year, “we are seeing a more consistent level of volume during what we would consider non-holiday months,” without the “deep valleys” that used to be seen after the holidays.

Still, the holidays “have been and continue to be one of the strongest selling seasons for us, so we work really hard with our retail partners to make sure that we get incremental displays into their stores and that we have our product on ad at that time,” she said. If there is “an opportunity to do in-store promotions, we like to really encourage them to do that during the holidays” because the product generally sells very well during that period.

“During the holiday times, we offer many of our varieties of dates on promotion, and that is as an incentive, obviously, for the retail partners and for the customers,” Hanagan-Muths continued.

“We also have created a really fun display shipper that can [generate] incremental distribution of our product. They can be used during the holiday times. Those are designed around “a theme that we are using this year with our consumers during the holidays” called “Naughty or Nice.”

That is the theme of “a very aggressive consumer marketing campaign for the holidays,” she said. “We always try to tie our in-store promotions to what is going on in the consumer arena as well, and that is print, digital and social media driven.”

The “Naughty or Nice” theme is a play on Santa Clause checking his list, “but it doesn’t just focus on Christmas,” she said.

The idea is that dates are versatile and can be used in “a very decadent dessert” or as “a very healthy snacking alternative” or a healthy appetizer, partnered, for example, with pears and cheese.

As part of the holiday display, “we have recipes that capture both decadent and health recipe applications of dates,” she said. “That is something we are offering this year that is new. It is a totally different look for us.”