The California Table Grape Commission, based in Fresno, is actively involved in a variety of trade-oriented promotional activities and consumer communications efforts throughout the California grape season. Those programs were launched in May announcing the start of the season, and they continue through the peak production periods of late summer and fall, extending even past the end of the year.

The retail programs that will run from September forward are "pretty much a continuation of what we have been doing since the start of the season," said Karen Brux, the commission's vice president of marketing communications. They involve season-long volume-based promotions with retailers. Those started in May and they go through mid-January.

"Our team of marketing executives, Cindy Plummer and her colleagues," has been going out and meeting with retailers, "making sure they have all of the information and the tools they need to best promote grapes from California," Ms. Brux said. They were "just wrapping up their second round of calls" which take place in August and September "and will be starting their third round of calls. So were are really meeting with retailers throughout the season."

The commission continues its involvement with The Food Network, she said. "We are continuing to leverage Food Network media with retailers throughout the season. We are offering tag ads in the magazine and online at FoodNetwork.com."

In Canada, the commission is "working with one of their top women's magazines, Chatelaine," she said. "We will be offering tag ads from August through December" in that publication.

Another form of tag ads offered by the commission is traffic radio. They are designed is "to get retailers to upgrade their grape ads to a front page ad" or an ad featuring multiple varieties, Ms. Brux said. "These tagged radio ads will be ongoing in both the U.S. and Canada."

Also, the commission will be sending retail newsletters to retailers every two weeks through of the end of the season, she said.

As part of the commission's consumer outreach, " we are going to be in New York City having a satellite Integrated media tour," Ms. Brux said. "That means it is not just a satellite media tour. It also includes online. So we will be having live segments and taped segments with TV stations but we will also have a number of bloggers" participating in the event. "That is targeting on 18 to 20 markets across the country."

The satellite integrated media tour will feature Ellie Krieger "talking about healthy and tasty snacks that are perfect for everything from school lunches to dinner parties," she said.

Ms. Krieger, celebrity chef and nutritionist and host of The Food Network show "Healthy Appetite," which now airs on the Cooking Channel, has been and will continue to be involved in many of the commission's consumer education and media relations activities this year.

Earlier in the season, the commission did a blitz broadcast on healthful summer snacking on Win Win Radio that aired on 422 stations, achieving more than eight million impressions. In August, "we are going to do another ... win-win radio program" with a back-to-school theme, she said. It, too, "will reach over 400 radio stations and millions of customers with health and usage information about grapes from California."

The commission will sponsor an additional 30 salad bars in California schools, in addition to the 28 it has already sponsored, she said. Along with that, "we have a bilingual flyer that is available for students and parents. At some point in the fall we will be sending out a bilingual news release as well."

The commission is engaged in "an ongoing outreach to the Hispanic market" as well as to the general market, Ms. Brux said. "We had our big luncheon for the Hispanic market in July. Now we are going to be reaching out a bit more to Hispanic media in Los Angeles, and continuing our overall outreach program through the end of the season."

New in the commission's consumer communications programs this year is something called a "blog hop." That is "when you have bloggers that get together to write about different aspects of a product," Ms. Brux said. "In our case, we have one [blogger] who is writing about nutrition, one who is writing about grapes and kids, and one who is writing about different usage ideas. And they link to each others' blogs, but each one of them is profiling a different aspect of grapes."

This year, the commission will be sponsoring a reception for supermarket dieticians at the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' Food & Nutrition Conference and Expo, to be held Oct. 6-9 in Philadelphia, she said. "New for 2012, we will have a 20x20 booth" at the event. We will be distributing healthy grape snacks and a new brochure that we have put out specifically for dieticians and nutritionists, and we will also have Ellie [Krieger] at our booth for one of the days."

In social media, "we are going to continue to run contests on Facebook," she said. "We just wrapped up one" and will be "moving on to the net contest which launches in September." The theme will be grapes as a work of art, "so we will be encouraging adults and hopefully moms and dads in conjunction with their kids to make interesting fruit sculptures using grapes. The first one was quite successful. We actually doubled our an base during the promotion period."