Salad in Sealed Bags Isn't So Simple, It Seems
January 14, 2003
By AMANDA HESSER
YUMA, Ariz. - For millions of Americans, preparing a mixed
green salad is as easy as opening a sealed plastic bag. But
here in the land of lettuce, complexity is a given, and
time is the enemy.
There is a reason bagged lettuce costs more than twice as
much as a head of iceberg. It is not easy getting those
perfectly formed leaves, washed and still fresh, from the
soil to the table. The process requires speed, technology,
secrecy about that technology and plain-old farmers'
ingenuity.
Bagged salad sales in the United States have soared in the
past decade, exceeding $2 billion last year, according to
ACNielsen, the market research company. And while iceberg
may still be king, accounting for 73 percent of all lettuce
grown in this country, that is a decline from 84 percent in
1992. Consumption of romaine and leaf lettuces like green
leaf and red oak has more than doubled since the early
1990's.
"We have a department working on lettuce breeding," said
Peggy Miars, a spokeswoman for Earthbound Farm, a grower
here whose annual sales have grown an average of 55 percent
since 1995. "You don't want a bagful of lettuces that are
all flat. That is the main reason we have the frisée in
there - for texture. They are also breeding for better
colors. Deeper reds are desirable."
Whatever the color, speed is of the essence. The moment the
plants are shaved from the ground, the clock starts
ticking. Six days is allowed for washing and bagging the
lettuce and transporting it around the country, and about a
week more to sell it. After that, the leaves turn slimy.
And slimy lettuce can be disastrous. As Bill Zinke, vice
president for marketing at Ready Pac Produce of Irwindale,
Calif., which processes bagged salads, said, "It's
constantly a business of staying up to and ahead of what
fields you will be harvesting, not just today and this week
but weeks and months in advance."
Earthbound said it was the first company to package lettuce
in bags, starting in 1986. And by packaging whole baby
leaves instead of mature heads cut into bite-size pieces,
it can move lettuce to market without giving it the
"nitrogen flush" that bags of cut-up romaine or iceberg
lettuce need to keep the cut edges from browning.
But baby greens have to be harvested in just a few days,
before they grow too big. Each bag of what the company
calls its "mixed baby greens" has at least eight varieties
of specialty lettuce, nearly all of which had to be ready
for harvest the same day.
For Earthbound Farm, the country's largest producer of
organic salads, it all begins in fields here. More than 90
percent of all lettuce in the United States is grown in
Arizona and in California, mostly from two regions - Yuma
in the winter, and the Salinas Valley in the summer.
The places where the greens are sorted look like a Rube
Goldberg drawing. Bins of freshly cut leaves are rushed
from nearby farms to the packing plant in refrigerated
trucks. Then the bins are lifted into a vacuum tube the
diameter of a subway tunnel.
In 20 minutes, the vacuum brings the temperature of the
lettuce down to 36 degrees, and it goes into cold storage.
Maintaining that temperature until it reaches the grocery
will keep it fresh for about 15 days.
Inside, the packing plant is cold and wet, and loud as a
jackhammer, as enormous production lines ferry the tiny
greens from bin to bag. First, they are upended onto
conveyors, passing a row of inspectors and sweeping down a
flume into the world's largest salad spinners. Then up
conveyors they go, to giant scales and bagging machines.
More than 14,000 pounds of lettuce can be processed every
hour.
This is where the secrets are kept. The way the flume
swishes the lettuce and how harshly the spinners treat it
affect how much it is damaged and how nearly perfect and
dry the leaves are in the bag. A photographer sent to
capture the process was not permitted to take close-ups of
the newest machines. Pen and paper were heavily
discouraged.
"It is a very competitive environment," Drew Goodman, the
president of Earthbound Farm, said. "At most, you get six
months" before new ideas are picked up by rivals.
"With the different service providers and maintenance
people," he added, "most any new development is going to be
- available, let's say, to others."
Mr. Zinke would not discuss Ready Pac's salad washing or
drying process. "It's a very slim-margin business," he
said. "So you hang closely on your points of difference
that give you a competitive edge."
Almost none of the technology now used in the industry
existed 15 years ago. Mr. Goodman and his wife, Myra
Goodman, the founders of Earthbound Farm, started growing
lettuce in their backyard in the 1980's. Last year the
business, which specializes in baby organic lettuce, had
sales of more than $200 million.
The Goodmans developed much of their machinery out of
necessity - a salad spinner, for example, that dries
smaller batches of lettuce at lower speeds, causing less
damage to the leaves. Machines like it are now widely used
in the industry.
In Earthbound's new 115,000-square-foot plant in Yuma, the
water flumes have swirling jets to keep the delicate leaves
from clumping. The temperature throughout the plant is
controlled by a master computer. Charles Sweat, the chief
operating officer, travels by company jet between here and
the summer plant in San Juan Bautista, Calif., and he can
adjust the temperatures by remote control on his laptop.
Once the lettuce is bagged, it is sent off in refrigerated
semitrailers to stores around the country. Company
officials can only hope that the cooling units on the
trucks work well and that the markets store the salad in a
cool place.
Fresh Express, which deals mostly in head lettuce that is
cut and put into bags, has processing plants around the
country, so its workers can cut the heads into bite-size
pieces closer to their destination, increasing shelf life.
Other companies, including Ready Pac, simply have to hurry
to get lettuce on the road.
One of the most important advances in keeping baby and cut
lettuce crisp from the time it is packed on the West Coast
until it arrives on the East Coast was the development of a
new bag to pack it in.
"We had a breakthrough in 1989 that allowed us to take it
national," said Robin Sprague, a spokeswoman for Fresh
Express, one of the companies that began using the process.
The packaging, a plastic film that her company calls
"modified atmosphere packaging," gives the cut lettuce a
longer shelf life by slowing the rate of decay.
At nearly the same time, Ready Pac came up with two more
innovations: a system for washing the lettuce three times
and a "pillow pack," a bag that is inflated with extra
nitrogen to protect the leaves from bruising during
shipping.
Organic lettuce is still just about 4 percent, of a giant
industry whose change and growth is rippling through other
businesses. "What we're talking about," said Ken Hodge, the
communications director for the International Fresh-cut
Produce Association, "is a phenomenon that has cut across
the whole produce industry." Freshly cut fruits are
expected to be the next big thing.
Still, salad makers are fighting to take their industry to
a new level. They are busy reducing the amount of salad
that clumps in the machine. They are improving the tatsoi's
texture, and the time it takes lettuce to go from the
Arizona field to a dinner table in Bangor, Me.
"This business is really about performing every day," said
Mr. Goodman of Earthbound Farm. "So that means having the
best quality every day and innovating every day. So
hopefully, we're on to our next innovation while our
competition is figuring out our last one."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company. |
