Packhouse

How Our Tomatoes Are Packed For You

Each variety of tomato is handpicked for you from the vines and placed in a produce crate. The crates are stacked onto a pallet and transported by a forklift to the Pack House. Here, they are taken to the various packing stations by variety.

The larger tomatoes (beefsteak) are processed in what we affectionately refer to as the “red machine” (View Diagram), which was engineered and built by a local SDSU engineering student* specifically for Garden Fresh Vegetables’ needs.

Each crate is transferred by hand onto a roller belt system outside of the “red machine” which gently inverts the crate onto a conveyor belt, returning the empty crate for sanitation and allowing the tomatoes to continue into the “Aweta” system.

The Aweta** system narrows the wide conveyor belt into three separate smaller conveyors, allowing the produce to travel into an enclosed computerized viewer. The computer is programmed to sort and identify each tomato by color. Each tomato’s weight, size and color are recorded here.

The tomato leaves this section and passes into a “cup-conveyor” where based on the computerized information is delivered to one of seventeen (17) bins for individual hand packing, again based on its size, weight, color and quality.

The beefsteak tomatoes are all packed in fifteen (15) pound boxes with individual liners that accommodate the necessary count to make the fifteen (15) pound GFV requirement. The number of tomatoes in each box will range from 13 to 52 per box.

When the boxes are packed, they are transferred to another roller conveyor. Once again each box is inspected for premium quality and passes through a sticker machine that labels each tomato with Garden Fresh Vegetables’ brand. They are then placed on pallets where each is tracked by an internal control system.

The TOVs (or tomatoes-on-the-vine) are individually handled to ensure quality, size, number per vine and coloring. The TOVs are gently placed on a foam packing within a GFV branded box. Each box leaves our facility weighing between 13.30 – 13.60 pounds, to allow for any shrinkage during transportation.

Flavorinos and Cherry tomatoes are hand packed into plastic pint clam shell containers in the clamshell line. Four (4) and six (6) packs (medium size tomatoes, usually individual TOVs) are individually packed and labeled.