ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 9, 1996 TAG: 9608090036
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALINAS, CALIF.
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
Take a moment to consider the food brands at your neighborhood supermarket.
You might recognize Stouffer's, Sara Lee or Campbell's. But few people may recognize Fresh Express, even though it dominates the fastest-growing category in the convenience food game - fresh, pre-cut, packaged salad.
Fresh Express Inc. has been growing at more than 20 percent a year and is on track to produce $450 million in sales this year. Sales are second-highest ever for a new grocery item, - period - behind only Nabisco Snackwell's low-fat cookies and crackers, according to Information Resources Inc., a Chicago-based supermarket sales research firm.
Fresh Express is no stranger to the produce aisle, where the company created a home 70 years ago, initially as Bruce Church Co., one of the nation's largest lettuce growers and distributors. The company has developed a superior feel for the consumer pulse, as well as the produce industry's biggest network of specialized production plants.
The company successfully overcame the daunting challenge of converting itself from a traditional vegetable-farming company into a sophisticated producer and marketer of consumer goods. Fresh Express has become the overwhelming leader in the ready-to-eat salad craze, now a $762 million market.
Supermarket sales of pre-packaged salads and other so-called home meal replacements are soaring because of the time crunch afflicting families in the '90s. Consumers are willing to pay more to avoid the hassle of food preparation. Nearly one of every two food dollars is spent on food prepared outside the home, compared to one in three in 1970, according to The Food Institute, a Fair Lawn, N.J., food industry research group.
Fresh Express has been supplying restaurants with packaged salads since 1979, but it didn't break into the far more lucrative supermarket business until 1989, years after supermarkets began setting out their own self-serve, pre-cut salads.
It was not a simple move. Fresh Express first had to refine the technology of its plastic ``breathable'' bag, which regulates the atmosphere in each salad package.
The company then had to convince supermarket marketing and purchasing personnel that its concept had big-time potential. A supermarket's decision to put a new product on the shelves is always risky - 20,000 products are introduced in supermarkets annually, but only 1 percent survive more than a year, according to Information Resources.
Fresh Express salads were an especially big gamble because they're expensive - most cost $2 to $4 for a 6-ounce or 8-ounce serving, depending on ingredients - and have a shelf life of only 14 days.
Each weekday, 24 flatbed trucks, each carrying nearly 31,000 pounds of vegetables from nearby fields, pull up to the back of the company's 186,000-square-foot factory. The lettuce is unloaded into chutes feeding a dozen production lines.
Four hundred workers wearing red hard hats, hair nets, sweat shirts and white smocks wash, core, mix and package lettuce, carrots and other produce in cavernous rooms cooled to 38 degrees. The cold temperature lengthens the life span of the product.
The lettuce is weighed, vacuum-cooled, then trimmed. After that it's washed in a chlorinated canal, spin-dried in giant centrifuges and mixed with cabbage, sliced carrots and broccoli. The mix is then cooled again and dropped through 10-foot-long stainless steel tubes, where it's automatically enclosed and sealed in plastic bags. The bags, which are queued up in a warehouse bigger than a football field, always leave the plant within 24 hours.
The company's crucial plastic bag technology limits the amount of oxygen that seeps into the bag, thereby slowing the rate at which the greens decompose. In more recent years, supermarkets have improved refrigeration equipment used in the produce section, further extending shelf life.
``Fresh Express salads represent the biggest development in the supermarket produce section in the last 10 years,'' says Lynn Dornblaser, publisher of New Product News, a Chicago trade publication. ``It's totally changing the way consumers buy salad greens.''
Supplying pre-made salads to restaurants remains one-third of the company's food service business, but the supermarket trade accounts for two-thirds. ``Our growth in the supermarket category has wildly exceeded my expectations,'' says Paul Cracknell, who joined Fresh Express a decade ago as a salesman and today is director of new product development.
Earlier this year, the company introduced the first in a line of ready-to-eat packaged fresh fruit - ``Grape Escape'' - and it has teamed up with Cincinnati-based Hillshire Farm to offer packaged salads with meat in September. The fruit offerings will largely be snacks targeted at kids, but Cracknell says they ultimately could bring in more revenue than the salads.
Fresh Express's six nationwide plants allow it to deliver products to every major metropolitan center within 24 hours. No competitor has more than two fresh-salad plants.
``We're obviously not the only purveyor of fresh packaged salads,'' says Steve Taylor, the company's chairman and CEO. ``But our market share [37 percent, vs. 28 percent for Dole Foods Co.] shows we're doing something right.''
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN SPEARMAN/Staff. George Collins, the produce managerby CNBat Harris Teeter in
Towers Mall, organizes the packaged salads. Fresh Express Inc.
dominates this
new, fast-growing food category. color. Graphic: Chart: Lettuce tell
you. color.