Hurricane Irene, the dog days of summer and now school is getting back in session... But what does it all mean for Iceberg Lettuce suppliers? I spoke to three industry experts on today's episode.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Doug Classen, Sales Manager for The Nunes Company, Inc., stated, “ We have just come out of probably our lightest part of the summertime. August is typically a little bit lighter then normal because of the general business trend that August brings with lighter demand. But, we are moving into our Fall production which ramps back up to normal to maybe a little bit above normal. In the coming couple weeks would be a good time to go ahead and promote iceberg lettuce, our weights are generally low forties. We’ve got good color, good condition. It’s been travelling very, very well. We’ve had very good runs all over the East coast, all over the country, really.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Matt Modena, VP of Business Development for River Ranch Fresh Foods, LLC, said, “Right now, we are harvesting anywhere from Soledad up toward Watsonville. Yields out of the field have been good on the bin side, on the carton side, they’ve been optimal: right around that forty-five to forty-seven pound per box. On the quality and the weight side, a nice green color. A little bit here and there you’ll see some mildew pop up in some certain locations. From a quality standpoint, that’s really the only thing that you got to look out for right now. Demand normally softens up in the dog days of summer a little bit but now its starting to pick back up again with school business coming back.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Mike Antle, Executive Vice President for Tanimura & Antle, explained, “Depending on where you are harvesting, some shippers are experiencing a little higher instances of decay and mildew. We have a few blocks where we are dropping a few heads and certainly affecting yields. Whenever we go into the Fall conditions its pretty dicey, it all depends on what is going to happen on the demand side. We had that big hurricane that went through the East coast and certainly we should start to see some type of higher demand for West coast products but it is difficult to tell at this point if we were to get a little bit more demand that the market may improve.”<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">
