New Georgia Law Sniffs Out Bogus Vidalia Onions

There are onions and there are onions--and then there are Vidalia sweet onions.

That’s what they tell you in this rural southeastern Georgia town of 12,500, which boasts of being the “sweet onion capital” of the world.

“Vidalia sweets are the caviar of onions,” said Victor Cross, director of the Vidalia (pronounced Vy-DALE-yuh) Chamber of Commerce. “They don’t make you cry, they don’t burn your mouth and they don’t give you heartburn or bad breath. Some people claim you can even peel them and eat them like apples.”

That’s a claim that even many Vidalians themselves prefer to take on faith. But one thing is certain: So prized are Vidalia sweets by housewives and gourmets, from Manhattan to Manhattan Beach, Calif., that they can command prices four or five times those of their humbler cousins.

For Vidalia sweet growers, that has added up to a $30-million-a-year crop, or half again as much as Georgia’s famed peach crop.

It has also added up to a lot of headaches, because the celebrity status of this virtuoso vegetable has spawned a growing market in bogus Vidalia onions.

Unscrupulous growers and distributors have been taking cheap and inferior look-alikes--particularly from Texas and Florida--cinching them up in bags with a Vidalia label and pawning them off as the genuine article at much-inflated prices.

Written Definition

Furthermore, until last week, they had been almost certain to get away with it, because the lack of written legal definition of Vidalia sweets had made it virtually impossible to win a court case against the onion counterfeiters.

But after years of hand-wringing and arguing over how to draw the boundaries of the Vidalia growing area, the Georgia Legislature and Gov. Joe Frank Harris acted Jan. 31 to take a big bite out of the bogus onion market. By a vote of 52 to 0, the Senate passed a bill, approved earlier by the House, to let the Georgia Department of Agriculture define the area for what can and cannot be sold legally as a Vidalia sweet.

Harris signed it into law later the same day. That was enough to bring tears of relief to the eyes of Vidalia growers, who had complained that some counterfeiters became so bold they had the audacity to fob off their bogus bulbs right here during the Vidalia Onion Festival, an annual three-day event in May that draws more than 30,000 visitors.

“I’d like to put ‘em all in jail,” said burly, blunt-speaking R.L. Cato, one of the biggest Vidalia onion growers and shippers in Toombs County, the heartland of the Vidalia sweet country. “When they bring a load of onions in here, all it does is cut us out of a load. They can sell their onions cheaper, too, because they can buy their onions cheaper than we can grow the real thing.”

Last year, for example, look-alike Texas onions sold on the wholesale market for $4.50 per 50-pound bag. Add to that around $2 a bag to rebag them with a Vidalia label, and a counterfeiter’s expense would be $6.50. That compares with $8 to $9 in production and bagging costs for growers of the real thing.

Consumers’ Quandary

The bootleg industry has also caused a quandary among consumers, especially those who are trying out what they think are Vidalia sweets for the first time. When they bite into one, they wonder what all the to-do is about.

“We’ve had several tourists who’ve told us that they bought a bag of Vidalia onions and found them hot as fire,” said Betty Gray, manager of the Mandalay Motel in Lyons, a small town about six miles east of Vidalia. “But, of course, we know they just didn’t get the real thing.”

Connoisseurs elsewhere would also know better. A popular story here tells about the Southern Californian who was willing to pay $341 in air freight to have two 25-pound bags of Vidalia onions shipped overnight so that he could serve them the following day. The onions themselves cost a mere $16--cheap that year because of a bumper crop.

The true Vidalia is a Granex type F hybrid--a descendant of the fat, squat Bermuda onion to which it bears a resemblance. The Granex variety is grown throughout the country. But grown elsewhere, Vidalia fanciers say, it turns out hot. Grown in this area, for reasons not altogether known for certain, it comes out deliciously sweet and mild.

Low Sulfur Content

“It has something to do with the low sulfur content of the soil and the moderate climate in this region,” said Ben J. McDilda, a 47-year-old Toombs County onion grower who recalls pulling up onions at the age of 5 or 6 in the business his parents started and which he now runs.

“You plant these Granex seeds in the red-clay country of Georgia or anywhere else in these United States and you won’t get the same sweet, mild onion you do here,” he said.

That’s not quite true. Using the same Granex variety, Washington state produces a “Walla Walla sweet” and Hawaii grows a “Maui sweet”--both of which are considered close rivals.

But one test found Vidalia sweets to have a higher sugar content than the Walla Walla sweet. In fact, the test showed the Vidalia onion to be sweeter than that other classic Georgia native, Coca-Cola.

Gerald Achenbach, retired chairman of Piggly Wiggly Southern Inc., the biggest supermarket chain in Georgia and an early promoter of Vidalia onions, adds that planting varieties other than the Granex in the Vidalia area won’t produce a sweet onion either.

Experiment Failed

“I once experimented with some onions from Holland,” he said. “They came out so hard that you needed a crash helmet before biting into them. If I’d had some horsehide, I could have wrapped them up and sold them as baseballs.”

By tradition, true Vidalias can be grown only within a 30 to 35 mile radius of the city of Vidalia, but tradition has not been enough.

A court case last fall that turned into a cause celebre in Georgia involved Raymond O’Neil Scott, a produce dealer whose packing operation was raided by agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the county sheriff’s office and the state Department of Agriculture.

The raiders, who scattered migrant laborers and confiscated onions and records, were acting on a tip from a grower that tons of out-of-state onions were being rebagged and relabeled as Vidalia onions at Scott’s packing shed.

Defendant’s Argument

When the case went to trial, Scott admitted to buying onions from Texas and California, trucking them to Georgia and dumping them into bags labeled “Vidalia Sweet Onions.” But he argued that no written definition of a Vidalia existed.

Attorneys for the state had hoped to make a test case of a state law passed last January that boosted the fine for mislabeling Vidalia onions to $20,000 from $1,000. But Superior Court Judge Bryant Culpepper ruled that while there is “no greater testament than the wallets of the consumer” that Vidalia onions should be Georgia-grown, the lack of written legal definition left Scott’s onion labels technically legal. He freed Scott and barred the state from seeking additional penalties.

“Rules and regulations giving guidance to the people in this industry are desperately needed,” he said, a rebuke that prompted Georgia legislators to try harder to hammer out the bill that passed Jan. 31.