“The biggest change we have from the past” for the spring deal this year is that “our Roma tomato deal will be a lot larger than it was last season, said Jorge Quintero Jr., managing partner of Grower Alliance LLC in Nogales, AZ. “We are expecting a Roma tomato deal … of about 500,000 boxes, which is a significant increase” from the 150,000 boxes of Romas the company shipped in the spring of 2012.

The deal will start in March and run to the middle of June, he said.

In addition, “we are going to have beefsteak tomatoes, about 180,000 packages, which we did not have last year in the spring,” he said.

Jorge Quintero Jr.Grower Alliance will also have tomatoes during the summer out of Mexico. Last summer, “we had product in McAllen [TX], and we plan to do that again this summer,” he said. The company also has a few tomatoes in Culiacan, “basically the same deal we had last season.”

With all tomato programs combined, Grower Alliance will be in the tomato deal year-round, Mr. Quintero said.

The firm’s spring tomato deal is out of Obregon, Sonora, and the summer deal is from the state of Michoacan, he said. Both are high-tech greenhouse operations.

Tomatoes are the first item for which Grower Alliance has been able to “close out on deals with growers for year-round availability.” The plan is to achieve that same year-round program for other core items such as squash, honeydew melons, watermelons, cucumbers, Euro cucumbers and green beans, he said.

Initially, Grower Alliance had each of those items just in the spring and fall, and the company has already closed the winter gap. But “we have plans to go completely year-round like the tomatoes on those items,” Mr. Quintero said.

The company’s customer base continues to expand, “so we need to get those retail accounts and set up contracts so we can move all that volume,” he said.

For the 2013 spring deal in Nogales, Grower Alliance expects about the same amount of squash, cucumbers, green bell peppers, colored bell peppers, honeydews and watermelons as in the past. “The really big items will be honeydews and watermelons,” he said.

Despite the January freeze that affected some items, he said, “Overall, we are increasing” in volume this year.

“We are gearing up for a heavy spring deal, especially after it being so quiet in the last month because of the freeze” he said. “There was just not a lot of product coming in.”

With the Grower Alliance’s significant increase in the tomato category this year, and the extended season, “we are definitely paying close attention to the tomato suspension agreement” that has been revised and is “looking to come into effect the beginning of March,” making sure “that we know what to do if the agreement does go through,” Mr. Quintero said. “It is something that is going to be affecting us day in and day out. It is definitely going to have a big impact on us either way because of these big deals that we are in the process of securing.”