Mastronardi Produce Wins 10th Food Quality Award

Marcos A.R. Cantharino, left, global business director for DuPont Qualicon, joins Mastronardi Director of Food Safety Joshua R. McCallum and Vice President of Food Safety Joseph R. Darden as they accept the Food Quality Award with DuPont Global Marketing Manager Megan R. DeStefano on April 20.

Seeking the Best Fit

How does the company stay ahead of the curve in determining the need to introduce new technology? “We’re blessed to have people in the management team and owners who are visionary. They are always looking for a best new fit for Mastronardi Produce,” Darden said. “We also have staff who do a lot of traveling throughout the world to keep us informed of developing technologies and to build networks with technology professionals. Companies are contacting us even at the development stage of new technologies. We’re constantly trying to find something new.”

In 2010, new investments in technology included three projects with significant long-term value. These were an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, North America’s first carbon-negative greenhouse, and a system for vertical rearing of crop-bearing plants called the Terra­Sphere project.

Mastronardi’s significant growth in sales and market presence over the past half dozen years stimulated the need for a 21st-century approach to ERP. Executives realized that the company’s existing inventory management system had become outdated, cumbersome to use, and increasingly unable to handle the huge amount of data that the company receives on a daily basis. “We needed to upgrade to a more sophisticated system,” Darden recalled. So the company invested more than $1.5 million in an inventory management system from Toronto-based JustFoodERP. According to Mastronardi, this open system “is highly customizable and has limitless possibilities for us to create reports and set up in-house applications to accommodate any new or up-and-coming food safety requirement or initiative.”

Implementing the system required significant effort. “We phased it in over time,” Darden said. “We had to train our information technology group and all staff who would work on the system on a daily basis. Training everybody was a huge part of the implementation of the system. We did the lion’s share in 2010; now we’ll be building modules and adding on to the program to continuously improve it.”

Environmental Sustainability

Another new initiative represents a direct response to Mastronardi’s continuing emphasis on environmental sustainability. That emphasis emerged well before 2010; the company uses state-of-the-art European environmentally controlled and enclosed greenhouse technology to produce consistently flavorful vegetables year round while producing lower amounts of greenhouse gases than traditional techniques. The biologically controlled environment uses bees for pollination and beneficial insects such as ladybugs, rather than pesticides, to control harmful bugs.

That general approach had stemmed from a corporate commitment that began in the early 2000s. “It started with talk at management level about being in tune to sustain the environment,” Darden said. “By 2005-2006, we had what we called ‘the green team’ to develop the reuse/recycle/sustainability idea for every stage of our production and delivery—to manage the whole realm of environmental sustainability through all processes in the company.” Thus the company’s packaging procurement department secures packaging with minimal environmental impact and recycles to use less packaging material. And the company’s greenhouses use earth-friendly growing media like waste coconut husks—and 50% less water than fields in the open. The greenhouses also use recycled ingredients in alternative fuels, such as wood shavings, that would usually end up in landfills.

Last year, however, a new opportunity emerged to ramp up environmental sustainability. The company learned about a fertilizer manufacturing plant in Sombra, Ontario, owned by Terra Industries, that released carbon dioxide and heat as byproducts. Those two products, of course, are essential for the growth of plants in a cold environment.