MAS Melons & Grapes expanding products in 2015
MAS Melons & Grapes expanding products in 2015
RIO RICO, AZ — MAS Melons & Grapes, LLC, located here, is known as a major distributor of Mexican melons and grapes.
The company’s majority owner, Miguel (Miky) Suarez said a couple of new twists have been added to his offerings for this season.
“For the first time in our history, from Colima, we are shipping seedless watermelons,” Suarez said. “For the first time from anywhere, we have a very small deal in mini-watermelon.”
MAS Melons’ melon acreage is up 30 percent from a year ago.
This, he said, is a volume rebound from four or five years ago, when soil rotations and other production issues caused the firm to cut back its volume by 60 percent. “Now our quality has improved very, very much,” he said. “We want to get back to producing 500,000 cases of honeydew between January and April.”
Honeydew are “overwhelmingly our largest melon category.” In a mid-January interview, he indicated that markets were “very, very good.” Honeydew were in the $18-20 per case range because of Central America’s excessive rain creating honeydew production issues there. Central American growers had problems in the fall of 2014 as well as at the beginning of 2015.
“When we finish in late November, they start” in Central America, Suarez said. “They had rains and supplies were very, very low from mid-December on. And then the same for all of January. The markets are very high.”
“So, we have a good beginning,” he continued. “Watermelons are high now, too. It’s a good beginning for us.”
Forty percent of MAS’ sales go to export markets. The largest of these markets is Japan. The Japanese have been MAS customers for 14 years, with honeydew being the primary export product.
To assure the right brix levels for the choosey Japanese market, MAS installed light beam machines, which non-invasively read fruit sweetness levels in melons. Affiliated grower-packers in Caborca and Colima are armed with this expensive equipment.
Beyond honeydew, Suarez is beginning to ship Mexican broccoli, celery and avocados to Japan. “The Japanese like the watermelon samples we are sending now. We’ll see if we have a program there on watermelon, too!”
MAS expected to begin shipping Mexican grapes from Hermosillo about May 12. “Last year was early,” Suarez said. “It was in the first week of May.”
