Fresh Cut Magazine

Misionero Vegetables launches new Garden Cuts salad kit line

Consumers are eating at home more often these days, but they’re not willing to give up the restaurant-style foods they’re accustomed to. Misionero Vegetables’ new salad kit hit the market at just the right time: it offers retail consumers a restaurant experience in their own homes, said Dan Canales, vice president of marketing for Misionero Vegetables, Salinas, Calif. “We developed our unique salad kits with quality ingredients found in restaurant salads and are excited to bring them to the consumer,” Canales said. The four salad kits are part of Misionero’s Garden Cuts line, which includes bags and clamshells of ready-to-use leafy green blends and leaves. The new products are a complete salad packaged in a clear clamshell. The kits started shipping in February in four varieties: • The Iceberg Wedge kit is a wedge of an iceberg head of lettuce with bleu cheese, bacon bits and ranch dressing. • The…  » Read more

---

Foodservice, retail stores look for other sources of winter tomatoes after Florida freeze

Scott DiMare hasn’t seen so much devastation in decades. March is normally harvest for his tomato crops in Homestead, Fla., but freezing temperatures in January have ravaged fields across the state, leading to a dramatic reduction in the winter tomato market throughout the United States. “This has been the coldest winter in 40 years, as far as I know. The last time we’ve had weather like this was in the 1970s,” said DiMare, a manager for Florida-based DiMare Fresh, one of the nation’s largest tomato growers. “Production is off in Homestead, and we are just in the harvest.” Cold temperatures are nothing new to Florida, where winter lows periodically dip below freezing in many parts of central and northern Florida. But 2010 was different. It was far colder than usual, and prolonged freezing temperatures left many cold-sensitive crops, like peppers and tomatoes, at serious risk of loss and…  » Read more

---

Restaurants report slower sales, but expectations rise

According to restaurant operators, the restaurant industry is still facing contraction, but operator optimism improved at the start of 2010, according to the National Restaurant Association’s (NRA) Restaurant Performance Index (RPI), a monthly survey that tracks the industry’s health. The January index stood at 98.3, down from December’s 22-month high. “This is to be expected, as the previous month was at almost a two-year high,” said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of the research and information services division for the National Restaurant Association. January marked the 27th straight month that the index stood below 100, which indicates contraction in the market. The RPI is based on two components, the Current Situation Index and Expectations Index. The former surveys restaurant operators about the current month’s sales and customer traffic, and the latter reports operators’ plans and opinions for the next six months. More than half of restaurant operators reported…  » Read more

---