By JILL ROSENFELD
Staff Reporter
Claiming its onions are “so sweet you can eat ’em like an apple,” a Washington State onion growers association has targeted Los Angeles for its first major out-of-state marketing campaign.
Partnering with such groups as the California Avocado Commission, Walla Walla recently began offering free samples of its products to customers at L.A. supermarket chains such as Vons, Ralphs and Lucky.
“One of the reasons we’ve chosen L.A. is that our product is very perishable,” said Jennifer Erikson, director of the Walla Walla Sweet Onion Marketing Committee. “It’s easy to ship our product to L.A. in several days, guaranteeing a fresh product for consumer.”
Another reason: “We have a small promotion budget so all our dollars have to go into one market,” she said.
About 50 percent of Walla Walla’s sales are in the Pacific Northwest, and Erikson said the group plans to target one new region for expansion each year.
Los Angeles is indeed a logical place for Walla Walla to market its crop, agriculture officials say.
“We use a lot of onions,” said Cato Fiksdal, chief deputy to the L.A. County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office. “This is the biggest wholesale distribution area and concentration of population in the Western U.S. There are 15 million or more people who get produce out of this area.”
Nonetheless, Walla Walla faces stiff competition from growers in California and elsewhere. In the course of a season, the average supermarket will carry Maui sweet onions from Hawaii, Italian sweet onions from the San Joaquin Valley, as well as sweet onions supplied by the Idaho Oregon Onion Association, the Texas Onion Commission, and the Imperial Sweet Onion Commission. Vidalia sweet onions, brought in from Georgia, are the perennial favorite, however, said a supermarket produce manager who requested anonymity because of store policy.
Not that there’s any shortage of demand. “I’ve been around this onion game a long, long time,” said Wayne Mininger, executive vice president of the National Onion Association, a non-profit association for the U.S. bulb onion industry, based in Greeley, Colo. “Over the last 12 years, per-capita consumption of onions has increased 60 percent.”
The reason for the growth, Mininger said, is threefold. First, there has been a push in the last two decades to eat healthier foods. Second, there has been a newfound interest in spring and fresh onions, as outfits like the Walla Walla and the Vidalia Onion Committee educate the public about their products.
Third, and most important, over half of the meals in the U.S. are eaten away from home, Mininger said. Onions are attractive to chefs and accountants alike, because they are available year round and prices don’t fluctuate dramatically.
Sweet onions originally grew only in subtropical and tropical latitudes, and were very sensitive to day length and other weather conditions, said Mininger. Farmers discovered they could move the subtropical onions farther north by breeding them. They eventually developed a sweet onion that could grow as far North as Spain or Italy. The Walla Walla sweet onion seed was originally brought to Washington state from Italy.
