“We’ve got quite a few things going on,” said Matt Mandel, vice president of sales and marketing at SunFed in Nogales, AZ, in an interview with The Produce News.

“First and foremost, we have a very much expanded program on organics,” he said.

Also, “a nice item that we are going to be adding to our portfolio is elongated red peppers.”

In addition to SunFed’s fruit and vegetable programs out of Mexico, “we are expanding our production in the Dominican Republic as well,” Mr. Mandel said.

In the area of infrastructure, the company will soon be installing on the roof of its main warehouse what will be the single largest solar electrical generation in Santa Cruz County.

In the organic category, “we have added a few commodities, and we have actually increased our volume on the commodities that we were handling beforehand,” he said. The increases and additions are all “based on consumer demand. They are asking for the product, so it would be stupid not to help them out with that.”

Matt MandelSunFed’s organic program now consists of zucchini, yellow straight neck squash, slicing cucumbers, mini-cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew melons, watermelons, mini-watermelons and colored bell peppers, he said.

The addition of elongated red bell peppers to the SunFed product line came about by request also. “That is another one of those items that our customers have been begging us for,” Mr. Mandel said.

But the company doesn’t add new items just because someone requests them. “We are very much in the mind set if we can’t do something right, we don’t want to do it,” he said. So before going into production on the elongated reds, “we found the proper location and we found the proper partners to do it.”

That program was ready to start up in early December, and it will continue into May, he said. The peppers are being grown open-field.

Elongated reds are “one of those things that helps to bolster the overall demand” on red bell peppers, he said. That can be a little difficult to achieve simply by increasing the volume of hothouse-grown red bells, because “you kind of want to pair that up with your orange and your yellow peppers as well.” But the field-grown elongated reds provide “an opportunity to do some straight red volume. And because they are different from the blocky bells grown in the hothouse, they also give retailers an added item in the bell pepper category.

“We are definitely going to have a very nice program on that,” he said.

In the Dominican Republic, SunFed was currently doing only bell peppers, “but we are going to start up with cucumbers … in the next two weeks.” In addition, the Dominican program would involve “hopefully squash and possibly eggplant as well.”

The bells and squash were being grown in protected environments, and those programs “are going to be pretty much year-round,” Mr. Mandel said. “As of right now, all of our Dominican production is going into Pompano [FL], but we have looked at other ports of entry as well.”

The new solar installation is, for Mr. Mandel personally, one of the most exciting things the company is involved in currently. “We have signed an agreement to install the single largest solar installation on any building in Santa Cruz County,” he said. “That is going to be installed here on our main warehouse at 51 Kipper Street” in the Rio Rico Industrial Park north of Nogales. Construction was scheduled to start on the first installation in February. “We are hoping to have that up and running probably by March.” In addition, “we are also in the process of negotiating a system for our second warehouse next door. Between the two systems, we are going to have nearly a megawatt of solar power being produced.”

Solar generation systems is “one of those things where the incentives seem to be disappearing,” Mr. Mandel said, although SunFed was fortunate to be able to get in on some of the few still available, specifically state and local utility incentives.

“We’ve actually been working” at putting the solar project together for about two years, he said. “I think we are really just hitting that sweets pot where we are still getting some incentives but at the same time the overall price of solar has definitely come down over that time period.” The final tally on the project will come in at around 60 to 65 percent “of what we were originally quoted two years ago when we first started.”

If the incentives continue to go away, “we’ll see how long it will survive as an industry — if it is really being propped up that much by the incentives or if there really is that much of a demand,” he said.