Brad Paris, VP & General Manager, Global Produce
Well, here we are, about 6 weeks before the start of our fresh pomegranate season. At this point, there’s a lot of fruit on the trees and the little pomegranates are just starting to turn from green to red.
We will monitor the color development weekly for now, and then daily in the week or two before we start harvesting. We are also cutting open a lot of fruit in the fields to see how the arils inside are progressing. Right now, the arils (the kernels inside the pomegranate, for those of you who don’t know) are mainly white and taste a bit like a sour lemon, but over the next few weeks, they will develop that deep red color we look for and the sugar level will rise until they reach that perfect balance of sweet and tart.
At the same time that we’re monitoring the fruit in the field, we’re hiring the people we need and getting our equipment ready for the season. On an average day, we have about 2,000 people picking fruit in the field and a few hundred more at our processing plant doing the sorting and packing.
All of those people need to get hired and trained in the next few weeks and this is a massive HR effort. We also use quite a bit of high tech sorting equipment that must be calibrated with this year’s crop. You might be thinking, high tech and fruit, can you really combine those two terms in one sentence?
The answer is absolutely and I can tell you from experience that a first-time visitor to our processing plant is absolutely blown away by the number of high-resolution cameras we have sorting the fruit and the number of computers that it takes to process the information (21 ultra-fast PCs, in case you were curious).
Outside of the field and plant preparations, the thing that will keep me awake at nights over the next few weeks is worrying about the weather. Pomegranates like the hot summers in California’s San Joaquin Valley, but they need cool nights to get the external red color. The big concern, though, is that it will rain before the harvest is over. Rain doesn’t necessarily mean disaster, but the pomegranates are sensitive to water at that point so we’d rather not see rain until December. So that’s what I’ll be thinking about for the next month: farms, cameras and weather reports. We’re almost there!
