Educational
This website is a resource for the produce industry (for specific harvesting guidelines, product holding temperatures and creating specifications), but is also relevant to the every day consumer in terms of how to store produce. Specific commodity pages can be found here.
A free USDA book in PDF form that includes 138 commodity summaries on how individual produce items should be stored, common disorders, maturity indices (how to know when produce is mature enough to be harvested), and much more.
This website contains definitions of commonly used terms related to gardening and growing commercially.
This group is composed of people that are interested in growing “rare fruit”. If you scroll to the footer of their website, there are ‘Wiki’ pages for all types of fruit that describe the entire crops, from cultivation to the different types of cultivars you can grow. This is a great resource for growers, as well as anyone interested in learning more about the food they are eating.
The Produce Blue Book has a paid portion, but the valuable free portion to me is their Know Your Commodity section, as it provides crop specific information as well as seasonality calendars. This is the only place I have found crop specific seasonality calendars all in one place.
This website is more consumer focused and is full of information related to different fruits and vegetables, where they come from, and when and how to eat them.
Food Safety
CPS provides funding for food safety related research projects. Not only that, but they make all of their findings publicly available on their website. You can see all of their funded projects here, and if the project has been completed, you can also access the related publications.
This website is a compilation of different food safety resources. They also offer in-person and webinar seminars.
This page on the FDA website provides access to all official FSMA rules, as well as guidance documents.
If you haven’t yet started your food safety manual or need some inspiration on creating new SOPs or recording logs, this website is just the place to start! It is free, but you will have to provide an email address and create an account.
Food Safety News
These websites provides up-to-date news on food safety issues taking place in the food industry (not produce specific): Food Safety Magazine, Food Safety News
Governmental
The FDA provides information related to food safety. Some good resources on the FDA site include those on industry recall guidance and outbreak information.
The USDA provides U.S. Grade standards for fruits, vegetables and other specialty products (click on each link to be taken to those specific pages).
Produce News
This is one of my favorite online news sites for produce news. You get current information, both on a national and international level.
This group is responsible for providing multiple produce news sites, including Fruit Growers News, Vegetable Growers News, Produce Processing and Spudman.
This is a produce news site that is specifically catered to retail and retail trends.
Other Produce Related News Sites