A Year in Review

2014 is officially in the books! Earlier this week we took time to reflect on our teams’ undertakings these past 12 months. We’ve highlighted our Top 7 accomplishments of 2014 here:

1. Sustainability – In early 2014 we removed the shrink band from our clamshells. Our new sonic weld sealing technology is now used on all our salad trays; totaling a CO₂ reduction of 1,705 tons. In July we completed a 2,300 solar panel installation, followed by a wind turbine installation in November.

Solar Panels

Wind Turbine

2. Innovation – Our Directors of Automated Harvest introduced the first automated celery harvester to fields this past winter. Our salad plant introduced 7 robotic packaging machines.

Automated Celery Harvester

Robo Arms

3. New products – To kick off 2014 we launched an extension to our wildly popular Chopped Salad Kit Line – The Sweet Kale Chopped Salad. Weeks following, our single serve CHOPPED SALAD bowls were introduced and can currently be purchased at Raley’s & Save Mart Supermarkets. In early spring the Taylor Farms Organic Power Greens line was introduced to the market place and began flying off store shelves! Our large Cooking Greens line followed in late spring.

4. Food Safety – We did it again! Taylor Farms was awarded the Primary Producer of the Year By the SQF Institute. This is an incredible honor (two years in a row) and we are proud to be recognized by such a topnotch organization.

 {Jason Kawata, our Director of Quality Assurance}

5. Expansion – In April we proudly doubled our cut vegetable facility’s capacity; bringing the plant to 135,000 square feet. We broke ground on a new corporate office and look forward to our move in spring 2015 to downtown Salinas.

{Taylor Farms Retail Team visiting the construction site of the new office building}

6. Community Involvement – As the founding sponsor of the Salinas Valley Half Marathon, our team of Taylor Farms volunteers provided a wide variety of healthy and fresh snacks to the runners after their 13.1 mile race. To help ensure a healthy and bright future, we stuffed nearly 500 backpacks with school supplies for the entire 1^st grade classes at 4 local elementary schools to kick off the school year. Three New Golden Whistle Award Winners were named. We continued our support for ALS research – To date, Taylor Farms has contributed $1.2 million towards ALS TDI’s research program.

{Volunteers & Runners at the Salinas Valley Half Marathon}

{Stuffing Backpacks with School Supplies}

 {Taylor Farms Retail challenging other production plants to Strike Out ALS with the Ice Bucket Challenge}

7. The San Francisco Giants won the World Series!!! (Being a Northern California based company, we had to plug our team!)

In all seriousness, none of these accomplishments would be possible without the dedication of our outstanding team! We welcomed eight new additions to the Taylor Farms Retail Family and look forward to another great year!

To all our customers, we greatly thank you for the opportunity to provide fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables to your family’s tables. We appreciate the support and resolve to continually provide fresh, safe, innovative and healthy products to your table in 2015!