Market Minute: Produce aces Baldor and Turlock Fruit love serving up the Honey Deuce
Market Minute: Produce aces Baldor and Turlock Fruit love serving up the Honey Deuce
It sure seems that everything Taylor Swift touches turns to gold — or should I say platinum — though not everything needs her help becoming a hit.
Last year the mega star was seen at the U.S. Open enjoying the tournament’s official drink, the Honey Deuce. According to The New York Times, during last year’s two-week event the iconic drink generated $12.8 million — not too shabby.
The Honey Deuce contains vodka, lemonade, raspberry liqueur and its three skewered balls of honeydew melon, which give the drink its iconic look, with the melon resembling tennis balls.
For the past 16 years those melon balls have been provided by Baldor Specialty Foods. According to Baldor, for this year’s tournament the team expected to hand-scoop 2.3 million melon balls from the King O’ The West brand honeydew melons they receive from the Turlock Fruit Co., up from 1.9 million melon balls last year.
Baldor uses Turlock’s melons because, “They leave the fruit on the vine the longest, so it gets pretty sweet while it’s out there,” Jared Walton, the director of national accounts and sales operations at Baldor, told The New York Times.
Once the melon cases make it to New York, Walton said a small group of Baldor employees starts scoping at 6 a.m. each day at Baldor’s headquarters in the Bronx during the tournament before transporting them to the U.S. Tennis Center in Queens. Each year, Baldor prepares for a roughly 13 percent increase in Honey Deuce sales, which now sells for $23.
Stephen Smith, president of family-owned Turlock Fruit Co., which has been in business for more than 100 years, said that Turlock ships about 8,000 melons across the country to make the Honey Deuce cocktail.
In addition to the King O’ The West brand honeydew melons, Smith recently told KCRA in Sacramento, "We're in the middle of peak harvest right now, and we ship honey, cantaloupes and mixed variety melons."
