With the 2013 California date harvest nearly complete for Medjool dates and in full swing for Deglets, “we are going into our peak shipping season,” said Albert Keck, president of Hadley Date Gardens Inc. in Thermal, CA, in an interview with The Produce News Oct. 17. “We are shipping briskly,” and so far, the product was moving out as fast as it was coming in.

The shipping season for dates is definitely yearlong, Keck said. “We are seeing more of an established demand” throughout the year, and at Hadley Date Gardens “we do carry inventories for our customers that need supplies all year long.”

But “the holiday season is still the peak,” he said. “We are definitely seeing strong demand throughout the year for the product,” but the holiday season is “one of the traditional peaks that we enjoy.”

Dates continue to become “a more popular item in our culture,” Keck said. “We definitely pride ourselves in being a domestic supplier for the trade.”

Albert KeckA family owned and operated company, Hadley Date Gardens “traces its roots back to Paul Hadley, a legendary entrepreneur who in 1931 founded the famous roadside store business,” according to the Hadley website. “In the late 1980s, Hadley Date Gardens was purchased by the Keck family, pioneers in the California date industry for over 70 years.” The company is “a premier grower, packer and shipper of the highest quality California dates.”

Hadley grows and manages most of the dates it handles, Keck said, but “we also buy from growers that have been with us for many years.”

With the peak shipping season approaching, “we will be rolling out with our sales program,” he said. “Our sales program is pretty consistent with where we have been” in previous seasons with regard to packaging. Containers carry the “California Grown” logo. “We’ve got the U.S. flag on some of our labels now. And we are continuing” with the American Heart Association’s Heart Check mark “that we initiated a couple of years back.” The Heart Check mark assures that the product has been certified to meet AHA’s guidelines for a heart healthy food.

Most of the packaging is clear, see-through plastic tubs “with our label,” Keck said. “Those do really well.”

Clear containers “always seem to perform better during the holiday season,” he said. “But there are still a lot of dates out there in the gusseted bags, and those are [also] doing well.”

Hadley has Medjool dates, Deglet Noors and Zahidis, and in addition to whole dates, offers chopped dates, coconut rolls and almond rolls.

During the holiday period, “a lot of retailers like to have more than one variety” on display, Keck said. “We have customers that want the Deglets and the Medjools and the Zahidis along with coconut rolls and chopped dates available for their customers. We see more of that push during the holiday season, which makes sense.”

After the holidays, retailers may go back to “the more traditional formats with just the Deglets and Medjools and maybe the chopped,” which are “kind of the stock items for the remainder of the year. But the seasonal window is when they really like the varietal spectrum that we provide,” he said.

Currently “we are wrapping up our [2013] Medjool harvest, and for the most part that is looking pretty good,” Keck said. “We are probably going to peak with our Deglets here in the next week to 10 days,” which would be toward the end of October.

The Medjool crop was good, but the Deglet crop had suffered some rain damage, the extent of which was still being determined. Keck said that he expected the Deglet harvest to come in at around 10 to 20 percent less than it otherwise would have, “which is a little bitter, but not as bad as it could have been.”

Some of the younger, less mature orchards “got hit harder by the storms this summer,” he said. “But the more mature orchards are looking pretty good.”

With date palms, just the height of the trees can make a difference in how they are affected by weather, as mature orchards may be as much as 50 feet higher in elevation than the younger ones.

Even with the rain damage, the total size of the Deglet harvest is expected to be up over last year, with the younger plantings coming into production.

“We are starting to see a lot of new plantings coming into production ... which gives us a lot of optimism going forward,” Keck said. “We have been waiting for that as an industry.”

Demand for dates has been growing, but as date palms take so many years to come into production, the supply side cannot respond quickly to demand.

“The next few years, we are going to enjoy seeing some of that new production become more of a factor,” Keck said. “It just takes so long. You look at these new plantings, and it seems like a decade passes before they have any significant impact on production. You are always expecting it to be sooner than it is. But we are starting to see some of that get some traction now.”