Focus on customers is key to success
Taylor Farms is one of the largest suppliers of fresh-cut vegetables for the foodservice industry, and now the Salinas, Calif.-based company is making waves in the retail market.
Bruce Taylor started Taylor Farms 13 years ago after leaving Fresh Express to create a firm that was focused on foodservice. From the beginning, Peterson and the employees of Taylor Farms operated on a business model that was focused on what the customer wants.
“We wrap ourselves around the customer. They tell us what they need and we go out and find the most economical way to make it, rather than just inventing a product and just pushing it out,” said Alec Leach, president of Taylor Farms California.
That first plant in the Salad Bowl of the World – Salinas – sits not far from the fields where the leafy greens in the salad mixes are grown, and all around are other big names in the fresh-cut industry. Taylor Farms hosted a group of foodservice chefs and produce buyers during the Produce Marketing Association’s (PMA) Foodservice Conference and Expo July 24-26. Tour participants were able to get a rare look inside the facility where many of the products they serve came from.
The company showed off six foodservice products under development to those on the PMA tour, and welcomed the input of the chefs and buyers in the group. There was a lolla rossa green leaf salad (with radicchio and ribbon carrots); a spinach, lolla rossa and ribbon carrot salad; a broccoli slaw kit; a green butter leaf salad (with frisee and radicchio); a green butter and red butter lettuce salad; and a 48-count field pack of romaine hearts. The products each require unique research to find the best blends and the optimal packaging film to slow respiration and extend shelf life. The packaged bag of fresh-cut salad that a restaurant will receive appears deflated, but that’s not because it’s been vacuum packed. Taylor Farms uses a squeeze-pack method that helps extend freshness by allowing some air to stay in the bag, rather than removing all oxygen with a vacuum pack.
The newly refurbished Salinas plant opened in 1998 with 40,000 square feet of processing space and now sits at 125,000 square feet, with one whole room dedicated to iceberg blends and another room with lines for the various other leafy greens the company processes. There’s even a room dedicated to processing broccoli, and dedicated organic lines minimize downtime by not having to switch lines.
The processing rooms are kept at 34-36˚ F and the water in the wash lines is kept at 37-38˚ F. The wash lines also use chlorine at 20-50 ppm to prevent cross-contamination. The wash line chlorine level is monitored continuously and is considered the first critical control point in the plant. The second control point is the metal detector after bagging. In the iceberg salad blend processing room, line one is completely automated with the addition of an eight-basket dryer. The other seven lines use basket dryers that use manual labor to load and dump the cleaned product.
Food safety at the plant has always been a top priority, and Taylor Farms continues to stay at the forefront of safety. It’s audited about 30 times a season – 60 total for its two main processing facilities, not to mention the other operations throughout the United States and Mexico. On its last SQF audit, the Salinas plant scored 100 percent, and its other audits have all been in the high 90s. In addition to its traceability program, HACCP program and monitoring program for temperature and chlorine levels, the company invests in employee training. A recent addition to the food safety protocols employees must follow is a hand-sanitizing dip and a footbath at every entrance and exit. While it’s another step, Leach said a little extra training quickly incorporated the hand dips into employee routines.
Product comes into the plant from fields around the Salinas Valley, and Taylor Farms puts an emphasis on freshness. That’s no small task considering the plant receives 85 to 100 truckloads a day. The plant uses product from about 800 acres a week, or 124 acres a day. Just one product, iceberg lettuce, totals 7.5 million pounds of raw product a week. The raw product enters the plant in color-coded reusable plastic bins with tags that identify the field, date, harvester, specific item and the crew. The tags are color-coded, too, and the color changes daily so fresh product can be easily identified by the plant’s crew.
“Bruce Taylor’s philosophy is, the fresher the product the better,” said Tanya Mason, vice president of business development for Taylor Farms.
The raw product is processed and bagged within six to eight hours of harvest, and if any has to be stored in the coolers it’s processed first thing at the start of the first shift. The Salinas plant runs two shifts six days a week – and ships seven days a week – with a third shift being the sanitation crew. Depending on the type of leafy green being processed, the lines put out 30-40 bags per minute. In order to keep up with the processing lines, the harvest crews start out in the field at 1 a.m. and finish up by early afternoon. That way the raw product isn’t coming out of the field during the hottest part of the day, and there’s little raw product that has to be stored overnight.
A new piece of machinery developed by Taylor Farms will soon make harvesting leafy greens more efficient. The company showed off its prototype that was completed in July and will be going into the fields soon. The harvester is constructed entirely from stainless steel, save for a few non-contact areas like the wheels and engine parts that are painted. It works differently from other harvesters, which typically use a band saw to cut the product at the ground level. It cuts using water jets that fire a fine jet of water at 25,000 psi at the base of the plant. That reduces the amount of dirt and debris going onto the packing part of the harvester, which reduces the chance for contamination.
The harvester will also improve productivity in the fields. A typical harvester operates at about 350 pounds per man-hour and has a crew of eight to 12 on it. The new harvester needs only a driver and four sorters on top and can operate at 1,000 pounds per man-hour. It can harvest leafy greens at about one-half mile per hour, much faster than a traditional harvest platform.
With labor becoming tighter in the Salinas Valley, Leach said the increased productivity was an important part of the harvester project and was worth the thousands of dollars spent developing the custom, hand-made harvester. It even uses water more efficiently than a traditional harvester, because the water jets use very little water and the cut product doesn’t require the same amount of rinsing as hand-cut product.
Other Locations
Although Taylor Farms was founded in and identifies with the Salinas Valley, it doesn’t limit its operations there. The Salinas plant operates March through October, then production moves to Yuma, Ariz. The Salinas plant doesn’t just idle – it empties completely. The entire production facility packs up and moves to Yuma in a train of tractor-trailers 200 long. Few things get left behind, but the automated dryer is one. It takes months to dial in and is exceptionally large and heavy, so the Yuma plant uses a manual basket system instead of the automated one.
The big move takes place over the Thanksgiving weekend, so there’s no time for holidays for employees. When the shift ends on Wednesday, the packing begins. Everything has to be in place by Sunday so processing can start in Yuma on Monday morning.
Despite the logistics and man-hours required to move a large processing plant, it’s a more efficient use of the machinery, Mason said, because expensive equipment doesn’t sit unused seven months of the year.
Taylor Farms also owns regional processing plants that supply custom cuts to local foodservice operators. The company has one plant in Mexico and plants in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Tennessee and Texas.
