I just got back from three days at one of my favorite ag industry meetings: The Produce Marketing Association “Fresh Summit.”  To those in the industry this is just known as the PMA.   This is an event where the vast majority of the fresh produce and flower industry gathers to show off their products, their new ideas and all the technologies that help process, sort, package and preserve the freshness of the produce.    There are more than a thousand booths and a great many of them offer samples like the one pictured above.  You get to see new and exotic fruits and vegetables, some of which eventually make it into the mainstream (I’ll talk about some examples in a later post).  

So, basically I juist got to spend three days talking to people about produce, traceability, food safety and sustainability - all the while eating delicious produce samples.  If it didn’t cost $700 to get in I’m sure this event would be over-run.  I think they should have an additional week for consumers at some lower cost (maybe with a lottery for who gets to come).  

Anyway, I was encouraged to find that “sustainability” was a major theme this year - far more than two years ago which was the last time I got to go to the PMA.  I could blog for days about what I saw, but I’ll hit some highlights. 

There was a very cool alternative to the traditional cardboard “flat.” Most fresh produce is shipped in case boxes or in “flats” which are the units that retailers put out on the display if they don’t actually transfer the produce into bulk displays.  ECOPACK has come up with something they call a Green Box which is made of stackable flats or trays made of recyclable or returnable plastic that are 1/2 the weight of the cardboard.  The marketing and traceability information is on small sleeves attached to the ends of the tray. The link I will give you is directed to the produce industry, but you can see it’s sustainability focus.

I talked with some folks from  CSX who are involved in shipments of produce by rail.  They have done a lot of work to understand the carbon footprint of their transport and have monthly contests for their train engineers to see who can achieve the best fuel efficiency.  They are working on ways to make rail a more competitive option with trucking, even for fresh produce, by providing points of freight consolidation.  Especially for or those of you who live in places with that thing called “winter,” this is great for increasing the sustainability of your fresh produce supply.

On the trucking front, there was a company called Universal Container Inc. that has developed a refrigerated container technology for fresh produce shipping (could be on trucks, trains or ships) that uses liquid nitrogen for cooling rather than the standard diesel compressor technology.  It consumes little energy and has no carbon, particulate, NOX emissions or noise in operation.  Its only emission is nitrogen gas which is already ~80% of the atmosphere.  There is obviously energy involved in producing the liquid nitrogen, but that is really largely a co-product from companies that are after other atmospheric gases.  I’d like to see a full-blown LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) on this because I’d bet money that this will come out on top in terms of GHG in addition to the air and noise pollution advantages.

There were also some really cool sustainability things in the packaging area.  I’ll put that in a later post.

Perhaps the best example of sustainability innovation by a produce company came from the largest Onion company in the US, Gills Onions.  They put in an anaerobic digester to deal with the waste from their operations and are now generating enough energy to power 460 homes.  

I was encouraged, because even though I met some folks at the PMA who didn’t even have sustainability on their radar, I met far more produce industry people who were on-board with the importance of this issue.   I’m not at all saying that the sustainability challenge has been fully addressed by the fresh produce industry, but I was very impressed with the momentum I observed.

Your are welcome to comment on this site.  You can also email me at feedback.sdsavage@gmail.com.

All images from me, Steve Savage (Not a great photographer).

There is an old saying in the fresh produce industry: “Produce is purchased based on appearance, not by taste.”  This is unfortunately often true.  People buy their fruit and vegetables based on how fresh and blemish-free they look.  They don’t normally have the chance to do taste comparisons.  The reality is that lots of fruits and vegetables look better than they taste.

Fortunately, there have been some produce improvements that break through this “appearance” paradigm.  I’ll describe just four examples that are favorite of mine and about which I have some background information (don’t worry, no-one is paying me to promote these).

The Golden Pineapple

It used to be that buying a fresh pineapple was a high risk investment.  They were fairly expensive and much of the time they were so acidic that you would burn the roof of your mouth.  The Pineapple Research Institute in Hawaii developed a much sweeter, lower acid hybrid called 73-114, but for years it could never be commercialized because it couldn’t be successfully shipped to the US from either Central America or Hawaii.  Finally, the fruit company, Del Monte and the post-harvest technology company FMC figured out a a way for it to make it to US markets.  They found a particular food-safe wax that changed the gas exchange (CO2, water, oxygen…) such that the fruit could stay alive during shipping.  Del Monte launched this as “Del Monte Gold” in 1997.  Since then many companies have introduced “Golden Pineapples” and pineapple consumption has been rising ever since.

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Just a few days after Michelle Obama invited local fifth graders to help plant the White House Kitchen Garden, the MACA, a group which represents and is comprised of former executives from Dow AgroSciences, Monsanto and DuPont Crop Protection, sent the White House a letter (which can be viewed in its entirety here) expressing their disappointment that she had not “recognize[d] the role conventional agriculture plays in the US.”

But that’s not all. The group went on to provide a dose of propaganda educational information, including little known fact that “technology allows for farmers to meet the increasing demand for food and fiber in a sustainable manner.” Drawing a clear line between technology, undefined, and sustainability does not, in the strictest terms, suggest the group’s total disapproval of organic farming methods.

That outright statement came in an email MACA sent their members shortly after sending the first lady aforementioned letter, in which they said that the idea of an organic garden “made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.” [italics mine].

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I am all about buying local and in particular, I am a big supporter of local farmers. I’ve always seen Wal-Mart as the antithesis of my beliefs in creating a more regionally economically sustainable culture.

When a press release came through from Wal-Mart announcing their commitment to increase their use of local farmers to provide fresh produce, I was skeptical.

However, in doing a little research for this post, I visited the Wal-Mart website and found that they have an entire section devoted to sustainability. Okay. That is good. You can see that they are going to great lengths to at least appear to be implementing more sustainable activities across the board. But one could argue that these are all either cost-saving measures or done to be SC or Sustainable Correct, which is important to their marketing and PR efforts.

This cynical view of things aside, one could also argue that anything Wal-Mart implements on a corporate level will have a pretty big impact on whatever local economies they might otherwise be harming.

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