07/27/06 Getting the Sweets

Getting the sweets year-round. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Produce distributor Curry & Co., Brooks, Ore., announced a new year-round sweet onion program that is set to begin in August. President Matt Curry said the program will be available nationwide. CURRY: There's been a long history of Walla Walla Sweets coming from the Northwest and we've always done a little bit of that and then in the last 5 years in conjunction with a company called American Onion who actually is the growers of this product, we created a product called Hermiston Sweets which kind of came along after Walla Walla Sweets just to give you some seasonality here. Walla Walla's are basically a June through August onion and then there really wasn't a domestic onion to follow a Walla Walla. There were imports but not a domestic so basically we've been able to create with the help of seed companies and growing expertise to have a fall sweet. What this means is the grocery stores will be able to carry a fresher line of sweet onions year-round. CURRY: We kind of came to the determination that we have something special but we need to continue this into a more of year-round type of program because customers were asking for it and there seemed to be a need and we wanted to be a larger participant in the year-round sweet program. We're not storing sweets year-round, they're still coming from different parts of the country but they're always a fresh onion. Curry said he expects the program to start about Aug. 15 with the Hermiston Sweets, which should be available until December. The new Hermiston SweetReds are expected to be available from September to December. In 2007, the Vidalia sweets are expected to be available from April through August, and Walla Walla sweets should be available from June through August. Curry is hopeful this new program will be well received. CURRY: Well we hope it's a positive. There's a lot of as with anything you try something new, agriculture always has some sort of risk to it no question about it but the consumers are reaching out to the sweet onion more and more and we feel that we are more on the front side of the industry by providing a sweet onion and making it a year-round program through one company, I think that's a little more progressive than what's out there from some others. Curry & Co. has distributed primarily in the Northwest until last year, when it shipped Hermiston Sweets to the Midwest, Texas and the East Coast, Curry said. The new year-round program enables Curry & Co. to ship sweet, yellow, red and white onions from about June through March from American Onion's packing shed in Hermiston. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.