Cox Family shown above
California’s Coastline Family Farms, which ships from Salinas and Brawley as well as Yuma, AZ, recently joined forces with Madison Ranches in Echo, OR, to form Madison-Cox Onions LLC.
Coastline CEO/owner/grower Larry Cox said his family has been growing red, yellow and white dry onions in the Imperial Valley for more than three decades, and “With the dynamics of the produce marketplace, we wanted to consolidate our onion sales under the Coastline Family Farms structure and develop an all year round onion program on the West Coast.”
The Cox and Madison families have known each other for some time, and Larry said, the Oregon company has “a reputation for producing high quality premium onions in the Hermiston region of Oregon.” He added Coastline “knew they would be the right partner to help expand our production footprint.”
Jake Madison, fourth-generation farmer and CEO of Madison Ranches, added that the operations “began discussing working together in the Pacific Northwest last fall,” and he said “We are very excited about the opportunity to put together a quality oriented, year round onion program” built on a “strong foundation of trust, shared values and a focus on a customer centric business model.”
The new joint venture will produce red and yellow bulb onions in Hermiston with the first harvest in September. The onions will ship through March 2020, a press release said.
The release noted that Madison Ranches will be responsible for the production, storage, packing and shipping for the new venture. Madison-Cox General Manager Jonathan Miller said in the April 23 release, “We started construction this week on our new packing and storage facility which will feature a state-of-the-art, optical grading, sorting and packing line, capable of meeting the needs of our clients with onion bags ranging from 10-50lb. We focused the design on automation and state of the art equipment in order to deliver a premium product to our customers.”
Coastline
will handle the sales and marketing for the joint venture, according to Tonya
Giotta, vice president for foodservice sales. Tonya, a veteran of onion and
vegetable sales, is joined Carly Kwak-Bauch, vice president of product and channel
development. Both Tonya and Carly worked together at River Point Farms prior to
being “tapped by Coastline to develop a new dry onion business unit.:
Tonya noted, “The
addition of the Madison-Cox joint venture in Oregon, gives Coastline a
year-round, integrated west coast supply base. This enables us to provide
national and regional foodservice operators, distributors, wholesalers and
retail clients with a consistent year-round supply of premium dry onions.”
