With Halloween just around the corner, many retailers this week took this final opportunity to showcase their candy, costumes, decorations, and other affiliated goods. Pumpkins for carving and baking remained very popular nationwide. There was an abundance of ads featuring 10 for $10 and 5 for $5 deals on a variety of grocery items. Produce items offered 10 for $10 included apples, pears, baby carrots, celery, onions, and mangoes. The top five featured items were: grapes, asparagus, sweet onions, bartlett pears, and baby carrots. The total number of fresh produce ads changed minimally from last week to this week. However, there were significant changes in the number of fruit ads and vegetable ads. Fruit ads decreased 14% from last week, and vegetable ads increased nearly 10%. There is a notable decrease in the number of strawberry and cantaloupe ads. Likewise, significant increases are seen in the number of baby carrot, sweet onion, and squash ads.
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 21st 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.
From the federal docket this morning..continuing concern about soil fumigants from a grower's perspective...
SOIL FUMIGANT DOCKETS--REDS--- EPA-HQ-OPP-2005-0123,EPA-HQ-OPP-2007-0350for the past 20 years my family(OBrien) has been growing approx. 200 acres of strawberries in Manatee county(florida) (75 acres of tomatoes) and have 20 full time employee's and 150 seasonal workers. WE NEED YOUR HELP-- For 20 years we have had a 100%safety record and regard the safety of our employee's and the community to be a #1 priority but if you pass these regs the way they are written you might as well sign our death notice or give us a one way ticket to Mexico. These fumigants have allowed us to stay competitive with our 3rd. world competition without it we will lose any edge we have had but we will continue to experiment with alternitives. My 150 acre farm has some houses around it and the school board has bought the property behind me why does the American farmer get punished (without proof) for the action of others. We have been very good for the land we grow on. We use IPM and cover crops to help maintain good ag practices as do most growers. Your decision will impact the American fresh fruit and veg community for years to come Please we are good stewards of our land and we need your help.
