BOSTON — The New England Produce Council drew a sizeable and energetic crowd to its 2022 expo, held here Aug. 24-25. And those at the expo — sponsors, exhibitors, attendees and NEPC executives — really liked what they saw.

As one exhibitor said on the show floor, "This is probably the best NEPC show that I've attended in my many years of coming."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has imposed sanctions on three produce businesses for failing to meet contractual obligations to the sellers of produce they purchased and failing to pay reparation awards issued under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act. These sanctions include suspending the businesses’ PACA licenses and barring the principal operators of the businesses from engaging in PACA-licensed business or other activities without approval from USDA.

The following businesses and individuals are currently restricted from operating in the produce industry:

Instacart launched a new collection of inspirational shopping content and experiences across the Instacart App. Oriented around discovery, these experiences are brought to life with the launch of “The World is Your Cart,” Instacart’s newest creative system featuring GRAMMY Award-winning singer, rapper, flutist and entrepreneur Lizzo.

Strella, a freshness management company that builds technology to predict produce maturity, launched an automated quality management platform for retailers.

To date, Strella has worked predominantly with apple and pear suppliers utilizing proprietary sensing technology to predict shelf life and optimize inventory management. For nearly four years, it has worked with some of the largest U.S. apple and pear suppliers to make maturity-based inventory decisions. It has monitored nearly 2 billion pieces of fruit since 2019.

PickTrace has been selected as the Labor Management Solution of the Year in the 2022 AgTech Breakthrough Awards conducted by AgTech Breakthrough, which recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global agricultural and food technology markets today.

PickTrace enables organizations to rapidly hire and re-hire their workforce by digitizing the I-9 and W-4 document completion and storage process, removing the need for paper onboarding packets and manual data entry of employee details into payroll systems.

Wada Farms is seeing a bit of a delay with the start of its potato harvest in Colorado, and it anxiously awaits the influx of additional product in the currently depleted pipeline.

“We have nothing left in storage right now [in Colorado], and we’re seeing record high markets,” Michele Peterson, who works in sales for Wada Farms, said Aug. 11. “We usually start harvest around August 15, but we’re a couple of weeks late this year.”