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A mango tree’s flowers signal potential for #MuchosMangoes Flowers have been top of mind this week, and it wasn’t because my social media feed was bombarded by flowers for Valentine’s Day. Rather, throngs of vibrant photos and videos of mango blossoms from the #HermanosCrespos lit up my WhatsApp, exhibiting the last of the late blooms in the south, the new blooms bursting open in the north and the vibrant openings everywhere in-between. Beautiful mango flowers currently blanket most of Mexico. As we begin to learn more about the early season quality, yields, sizing, and the varietal nuances of the season from the southern regions’ mature fruit (where we’ve been packing for a month now), we are all filled with promise. That is what I love about mango blossoms: they gorgeously signal great possibilities in their abundance. Even though less than 1% of all blooms actually form fruit.
A deep dive into the when’s, why’s and how’s of the firm fleshed, farmer friendly mango My favorite mango is a Tommy Atkins, but it’s not because it’s farmer and supply chain friendly. It’s my favorite because it’s culinarily versatile and it also happens to be farmer and supply chain friendly which isn’t a bad thing. If you google Tommy Atkins, one of the first links is Wikipedia which describes in the first sentence the Tommy as not generally considered the best in terms of sweetness and flavor. If you ask me, this sets up Tommy for a negative bias before you’ve even seen one in real life. Yes, the statement that follows is true, basically saying: it’s grown because it fares well in the production and import supply chain. But, for real, this is a gigantic part of the equation, in all parts of the world, for all commodities. Not unique to Tommy. Before you hear the retort from an adoring Tommy Atkins fan, based on my professional mango expertise and observations, not to mention my culinary exploits, I want to report that we have harvested the first organic Tommy Atkins from El Grupo Crespo’s southern orchards and, as this glides into your inbox, our southern packhouses are cleaning, polishing, and packing them into several of our most coveted packaging SKU’s: the Crespo Big Box, Net Bags and the old faithful Crespo 4KG case (all of which have been designed to look dashing as both big and small mango displays while also proving strong as stand-alone displays and storage).
Plus, an additional NEW packhouse, Bola de Oro opens in Oaxaca Back in 2019, just prior to the mango season, El Grupo Crespo opened Empaque Don Jorge II (EDJII) in Ocozocoautla de Espinosa, Chiapas, or – as the locals call it – Coita. It was the Crespo family’s second proprietary mango packhouse, plus several hundred supporting hectares of organic mango orchards. The expanded mango volumes and increased packing outputs allowed the family business to expand and grow. This season El Grupo starts their 2023 mango programs with even more volume, more capacity and more varietals. It’s exciting for me to witness their growth and see the family rewarded with recognition from the industry, retailers, wholesalers and processors.
It’s beginning to look at lot like a prosperous Mexican Mango Season It’s that time of the year again when you all forget about fruits and vegetables amidst all the holiday hubbub, and also the time of the year when I begin thinking excessively about mangoes as we begin to prepare for the upcoming Mexican Mango Season! I’m not going to lie, I get giddy with anticipation of all the mangoes to come, usually cooking up something mango-centric to ring in the holiday season. This year it was my Mango Pork Mole & Christmas Tamales and a very special Mexican Mezcal Pechuga Mango Milk Punch. My excitement for mangoes had already been jostled more than normal for this time of year since fresh back from a recent trip to Egypt where I had been pleasantly surprised by all the mangoes.
Secret blush notes of the Sinaloa Keitt Mango Mangoes continue to surprise and delight me. They are a lot like people. Whenever I think I know something about them, they prove me wrong. Things that grow are complex by nature, and taking a cookie cutter approach to defining them always fails. As I proceed on my mango-centric food education mission, I have a responsibility to admit when I am wrong and when I too am guilty of being “scripted” along the way.
Thailand’s most famous dessert mango #HechoEnMexico Where exactly is Jorge the Crespo Mango Man these days? We haven’t seen him in a while, which usually means he’s deep in the thickets of his secret projects. Jorge Crespo is one of the four Crespo siblings, who alongside his mother run the family agricultural business ( El Grupo Crespo) that was established in 1960 in El Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico by Jorge Longinos Crespo, Jorge’s grandfather and whom he was named after. Jorge (Crespo) has a deep passion for all things new and different and a totally forward-thinking personality. All the Crespo siblings inherited this from their father, Roberto Crespo Fitch, who built Empaque Don Jorge in 1971 and began the family’s venture into the global world of growing, packing and exporting mangoes, and paving the way for Jorge’s sweet and intoxicating journey into growing the worlds most coveted mango cultivars in Mexico. El Grupo Crespo’s aim is not simply to increase production and consumption of organic Mexican mangoes but to do so in a way that creates long term viable, profitable and sustainable agricultural models for their surrounding growing communities. This not only means constantly improving but changing as markets do, as economics do and as consumers needs and desires do.