May 8, 2020

Crop Updates

Regarding COVID-19: California Giant is working hard to make every effort to ensure the health and safety of our colleagues and coworkers, while maintaining SAFE business and supply continuity of fresh berries to our customers. All areas of our supply chain continues to emphasize thorough sanitation practices and social distancing protocols. Thank you for being a valued customer of California Giant - We are all in this together!

Watsonville- Salinas:

California is going through peak volume over the next few weeks! We’re expecting a cooling trend to follow us into next week, bringing temperatures to the mid-60’s. There is a potential for rain early in the week; we’ll be watching this closely and will adjust crew schedules as needed in order to stay ahead of it. Overall, quality is great! We’re still seeing a small percentage of burnt calyx and bruising, but size remains 10-12 with a few 14’s here and there.

Santa Maria:

We’re expecting the same cooling trend as forecasted in Watsonville/Salinas next week. Fronteras and Monterey varieties have mostly an 18-22 count, San Andreas has a strong count of 16-18. New plantings of Monterey are in this week and next. Portola planting will start next week and throughout May.

Oxnard:

We’ve experienced warm weather of mid to high 70’s this week but are expecting a cool down over the weekend and into next week.

We are harvesting for freezer only here in Oxnard, but the crop looks good and is ideal for the process market.

Organic Strawberries:

Santa Maria organic strawberries are hitting peak production a few weeks earlier than planned. Size is coming back up to mid-teens for the San Andreas variety, which are coming on strong with very good volume and subsided mite pressure. Organic Fronteras has probably 2 more weeks, dropping 10-15% for quality. It doesn’t have size of the other varieties, but still nice fruit. Organic Cabrillo is not ripening evenly, creating some checkerboarding in the packs but the fruit is good, just not a perfect uniform color pack.

Raspberry

Watsonville-Salinas:

We’re expecting to start the season next week with very small volumes and an expected increase in volume as we move towards June.

Mexico:

Production in general continues gradually decrease. However, the Zamora volume will increase as we go into its peak over the next few weeks. We will receive less volume than we expected at the beginning of the season due to red mite and thrip* pressure that affected all raspberries. Some fields have been affected up to 100% because of this thrip pressure, so we’ve decided to prune to keep this at bay.

*Thrips are a little insect that affects the quality of the fruit, it feeds from the flower buds, causing irregular and misshapen fruit.

Blackberry

Watsonville-Salinas:

We’re expecting to start the season at the end of May with very small volumes and will see a steady increase of production moving forward.

Mexico:

Production continues to increase, however we are watching the weather as the forecasted rain could affect volume projections.

Blueberries

Mexico:

We’ve been experiencing rain and high temperatures, but quality remains good overall. Production is steadily decreasing as the season comes to a close towards the end of June.

Organic Blueberries:

We’re ready to start packing next week!

Oxnard Organic Blueberries:

Our volume has been up slightly over the original forecast! While high temperatures caused some quality issues over the past few weeks, we’ve adjusted our operations to only field pack rather than running the fruit over the packing line. This will help with improved quality moving forward.

Georgia

Due to the storm that came through mid-April, actual volume numbers fell below the estimate due to lost production. However, we’re expecting a steady volume over the next month before the season comes to a close. The rabbiteye crop will be starting in about two weeks and looks to be a little lighter and earlier this year compared to last year. Since the rabbiteye crop is starting a little earlier this year, it will also finish sooner than it did last year, which is now expected to be around week 25.

Central Valley California:

We’re forecasting a gradual increase in volume over the next two weeks, with peak expecting to hit around week 22. We’ll receive our first central valley organic fruit this week, and expect steady volumes for through the middle of June.

Oregon:

As of now, the crop looks to be ahead of where it was at this time last year. We’re expecting to be about a week earlier on the Oregon Duke crop this year than we were last year. Our estimated start date is June 15^th!

Weather Conditions

For up-to-date weather conditions in all of our growing regions, click on the region below. Wunderground.com is our go-to weather resource for fast and reliable weather updates.

May Menu

This week, we're celebrating National Strawberry Month! With temperatures steadily rising as we inch closer to summer, staying cool has never been sweeter.