Construction is under way on a huge new cooling and packing facility in Oxnard, CA, on a 20-acre site a 10-minute drive from the current bursting-at-the-seams facility of Mission Produce Inc. that will not only meet the company’s immediate expansion needs but will provide room for future growth, according to David Fausset, retail sales manager.

“In our old location, there really wasn’t any space to grow,” he said March 17. “We wanted to build something with enough capacity at the beginning that we can actually grow into.”

At 220,000 square feet, “it will be the largest avocado packinghouse in California,” and possibly in the world, Fausset said.

The current corporate headquarters of Mission Produce. In two or three years, the company expects so relocate the offices to a new office complex to be built on the same site as a new cooling and packing facility, also in Oxnard, now under construction.“We are in the middle of construction,” he continued. “We have laid the foundation down, the slab has been laid down, and now we are starting to build up our new facility. We will be cooling by the end of this year, and we will be able to pack there starting next [California] season.”

Within the next two to three years, the company will also relocate its corporate offices to the new facility, he said.

In January, Mission opened a new forward distribution center in Swedesboro, NJ, giving the company eight distribution locations in all — seven in the United States, including Oxnard, and one in Toronto.

With the 2014 California avocado harvest under way and a lighter crop on the trees than in 2013, Mission was seeing volume “starting to pick up each week” through March, Fausset said. “The expectation is that those numbers, for us, will continue to grow over the next couple of months.” He expected good supplies for the Cinco de May pull, with volume “really peaking out towards the Fourth of July pull. We should see the bulk of the bigger numbers being pulled from May through July” and starting to ramp down in August, which is much earlier than last year. “I think you are not going to see much fruit past August at all. It will drop way off in September.”

From a marketing standpoint, “you have to have strategies in which you get the best return that you can for your growers here,” while at the same time “trying to satisfy your customer base by giving them options from other countries” such as Mexico and Peru, Fausset said. As demand for avocados continues to rise in the United States, “the industry is having to rely on other sources to be able to handle the incremental increases in demand.”