PMA Day One

Tom Tjerandsen, marketing director for the Chilean Fresh Fruit Association, Sacramento, Calif., is interviewed by The Packer's Jose Escobedo on Oct. 24.


We arrived in Orlando about 11 a.m. this morning and had time to check into our hotel, deposit our luggage and take the red #1 shuttle to the convention center. Once there, got our badges from Theresa Z. in the press center. The highlight of the luncheon session, of course, was Bryan Silbermann's state of the industry address. Silbermann did give a nod to the traceability issue right out of the gate, including a nice touch of asking Tom Stenzel and Danny Dempster on stage with him so the three of them together could recognize the efforts of Cathy Green, chief operating officer for Food Lion LLC, Salisbury, N.C., and chairwoman of the Produce Traceability Initiative Steering Committee.

As you might expect, Silbermann's address was fairly wide-ranging, taking measure of the economy, the local food movement, organics, the development of young professional talent in the industry, sustainability and more. A theme: finding opportunity in crisis...
One excerpt:

Sometimes it seems we’ve written the words of Robert Louis Stevenson into our business philosophy: “Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”

Folks, Stevenson died in 1894! Do we really want to accept those words as guiding principles of our modern, complex 21^st century produce industry? Are we really willing to run our businesses with the motto “It is what it is”, or should we believe “It is what we make of it?”

Bryan Silbermann's prepared remarks for his state of the industry address can be found here.

After the luncheon, I attended a fairly low key workshop on country of origin labeling and later, an interesting meeting of Chilean importers who gathered at the Peabody Hotel. There are important developments in regard to the California grape desert marketing order that I'll talk about later in coverage for The Packer.

At the reception tonight, I talked to one Aussie mushroom industry leader who was stoked to hear more about Monterey Mushroom's Sun Bella Vitamin D infused mushrooms on the show floor tomorrow. He said much of the population in the U.S. and other developed countries has a Vitamin D deficiency and speculated the product could be a winner.

One wrinkle this year for me is that I have a Cardscan business card reader in tow, so I can collect as many business cards in the next couple of days as I may please without having that crushing defeated feeling of knowing I will never get around to transferring contact info. That's the theory anyway.

That's all for now, with a bigger day on tap for tomorrow.