006: Raisin' the Bar (Interview - Mariani Packing Company)

All right, we are back with another month and another new theme here on Trade Roots, and this month's theme is dried fruits.

So why are we talking dried fruits this month? Well, it is summertime and a lot of fruits in our region are hitting their peaks right now.

I'm a big fan of all the summer fruits, so really excited for this episode in particular.

But today we'll be talking to Carla from Mariani Packing Company about a lot of Mariani's specialty products like raisins and prunes, whose harvests are typically around that July-August timeframe that we're in right now.

Of course, across our full Western U.S. region, we grow tons of different types of fruit products, but a lot of our fresh fruit here in the U.S. tends to stay in the domestic market because that fresh fruit doesn't have a very long shelf life.

Dried fruit, on the other hand, does have a much longer shelf life, so it makes for a really great exported product.

And it can go all around the world and obviously have that long shelf life to maintain its value for a longer time.

And we'll get into this more with Carla and talk all things about exports and dried fruit.

But both at home and abroad, dried fruit can be sold as a snack food.

And then it's also used as an ingredient for a lot of other value-added products too.

And then we're often seeing dried fruit, both domestically and abroad, as a premium product that's packaged really nicely too.

yeah it really gives companies in that space like a lot of options with how to diversify their their operations so when i was researching this episode i was looking on euromonitor at the trade data and i saw that the rusada region in 2025 exported over 157 million dollars worth of dried fruit so that's that's a lot of dried fruit

yeah a huge industry

Yeah, bigger.

Yeah, bigger than I realized.

But you know, it goes in so many things like granola and cereal and trail mix baked goods, too.

Oh,

yeah, all over.

And I also learned a very fun fact while I was researching the episode about why, you know, we talk about a plum, which is also a prune, we talk about a grape, which is also a raisin, why do they have different names? And this goes back to the Norman conquest of England by the French in 1066.

So Over a thousand years ago, French became the language of the nobles in the land, whereas English remained the language of the common people.

And over the years, the two languages began to blend together.

We have a lot of words in English that are French.

And so fresh fruits were typically referred to by their English name, AKA grape, and dried fruits took on their French name, which was for grapes, which is where we got raisin and prune, which became the dried version of a plum.

Interesting.

So with that linguistic lesson, let's get into the interview.