Wada Farms Marketing Group, headquartered in Idaho Falls, Idaho, is a major supplier of potatoes from both Idaho and Colorado. In its Colorado operation, the company appears well-positioned to meet customers’ anticipated needs for Colorado potatoes through the beginning of the 2021 harvest.
“We have a good supply,” said Michele Peterson, head of the Colorado sales office in Monte Vista for Wada Farms. “We estimate it is going to take us through to the beginning of the new crop with good quality and good size profile.”
While that is never a certainty with potatoes until the last of them have come out of storage and been sorted, graded and packed, all indications are favorable to meeting customers’ needs through the summer.
“The size profile looks good,” said Peterson. “We’ve got some lots that are very large, we’ve got some lots that are small so we should be able to take care of whatever a buyer may need.”
Overall, the size of the storage crop the growers currently have in their potato warehouses is about normal for this time of year, she said, although that varies from grower to grower. Some are saying that they have more stock than normal for this time of year. Others are saying that they are right on track. In the end, it will depend on “how much shrink they are going to incur in June and July. Obviously that will have a huge impact,” she said.
To this point, there has been nothing to indicate that there will be problems. “It is a good crop. I don’t really see any issues,” she said. Any potatoes that look as though they might not store well are dealt with at harvest time. “When you know you have a problem, you try to get rid of it right after harvest in order to save yourself that cost of storing a bad crop. So, I do believe that what we have left is good quality,” she added. “For that reason, I think we may be right on track through the end of the shipping season. We will find out, and it is all based on how much our shrink will be during the summer.”
Everything currently being packed and shipped is “absolutely” high quality, she added.
From a marketing standpoint, the last year has obviously been unusual and has required some adjustments. “Colorado isn’t as driven toward the restaurant market as Idaho is,” Peterson said. So, the decline in restaurant business has not impacted Colorado potatoes as severely as it has some other states. On the retail side, demand for potatoes has been greater than normal over the past year and continues to be so. “Our movement has increased quite a bit as a marketing company, and we needed to look at what COVID-19 has done and how we needed to adapt. I think Wada has done a good job doing that. We went after a retail jumbo pack in addition to the usual retail packs, and that strategy continues,” she said.
Because of its heavy reliance on retail, “Colorado has always done some of that,” she said. “We have just had to do a little bit more than what we had in the past.”
Wada Farms’ potatoes from Colorado are primarily Russets, but the company offers other varieties as well. During the latter part of the 2019-20 marketing season fingerlings were an issue as far as movement, just because of the COVID-19 impact. With the 2020 crop, “we have been able to move the fingerlings much better than what we have historically,” Peterson said.