Andrew & Williamson Produce Co. in San Diego has boosted its production of heirloom tomatoes in the San Quentin growing region of Baja California, Mexico, for summer and fall harvest.

Mark Munger, vice president of marketingThe company’s recently introduced heirloom tomato program was “very small in the spring” from the Vizcaino region, and has since been expanded, said Mark Munger, vice president of marketing. The enhanced program will carry on, now, to different production areas in Mexico throughout the fall and winter and into next spring. “We are now full-on year-round heirloom tomato growers, and the heirlooms really tie in with our whole focus on flavor,” he said.

Andrew & Williamson has also expanded its organic program. “We just started shipping our very first organic round tomatoes out of the San Quentin growing region,” Mr. Munger said. That is “exciting for us, because our goal has been to have everything that we grow conventionally grown also organically, and round tomatoes are really the last big missing piece.”

The outstanding flavor that can be achieved with heirloom tomatoes has been a major factor in the company’s entry into the heirloom category. “We talk about flavor a lot,” Mr. Munger said, “and we have been talking with our seed partners about flavor as well.” With grape tomatoes, “I think we have done a pretty good job of getting high flavor built into the smaller tomatoes.” But getting that high flavor in larger tomatoes is more challenging, “just because of the way the genetics are set up, and you have a bigger mass” in which to try to get “concentrated sugars.”

A&W is, nonetheless, undaunted by the challenge. “We continue to be committed to it,” he said.

In fact, “we have found some new varieties” of big round tomatoes “that we think have fantastic tomato flavor. Ultimately our goal is we want all of our tomatoes to have that backyard flavor,” he said. “That is the language that we use,” and the focus is on “trying to define and understand what that means” and finding a way to accomplish it.

“Heirlooms were really a nice way for us to instantly get into high-flavor [large] tomatoes,” Mr. Munger continued. The heirloom varieties being grown by A&W “certainly taste better than really any other large tomato. I think that is what makes them so popular.” The challenge is that “they are very tricky to handle post-harvest because they have so much sugar they don’t have much shelf life.” But in learning how to handle the heirlooms, the company expects to develop practices that can be applied to other high-flavor tomatoes.

“Our thought was that by growing the heirloom tomatoes, we would learn how to handle an extremely high-flavor tomato, and it will make everything else that we do easier. It is really about changing our post-harvest and our harvest philosophy on them. We are [now] treating our tomatoes more like we treat berries.”

A&W is field packing the heirlooms to minimize handling, and then cooling them down to optimum temperature as quickly as possible, he said.

“Heirlooms are going to be an important part of our mix from here on out, but everything we learn about heirlooms is going to help make us better growers” of high-flavor tomatoes in other varieties, enabling them to be picked at a more advanced stage of ripeness, he said. “That is going to help us move our whole flavor program forward.”

A&W continues to focus on customization “to strengthen our relationship with our customers,” Mr. Munger said. “We are asking the packingsheds to take on more responsibility and increase the amount of completely finished product we are sending north to the border.

The customization relates to product specifications, including color, as well as to packaging. “We are really working hard to have all of our employees, all the way down to the field level, understand who our customers are and what their specific needs are,” he said. The company regards itself as “basically our customers’ factory floor, so with each of our customers we take on that mantle that we actually work directly for them,” creating products specifically “for them to sell.”

A&W will continue to have strong production in its tomato programs out of the San Quentin growing region until September. About that time, “we will shift down to the Vizcaino growing region” farther south, hopefully with “pretty good overlap,” going into fall, he said.