When Rich MacLeod, fresh from a master’s degree in postharvest technology, joined Salinas, CA-based TransFresh Corp. in 1976, the company was offering 8-year-old technology that was still best in its class. MacLeod is getting ready to retire after more than 40 years with the firm, which is still offering basically the same technology and which is still considered best in its class.

In today’s world, where it is said about 50 percent of what is learned as a freshman in college will be obsolete by graduation, it is comforting and quite amazing to ponder that the Tectrol Modified Packaging System pioneered in 1968 by TransFresh is still widely used today and is still keeping produce, especially strawberries, fresh throughout the pipeline.Rich MacLeod

To be sure, there have been some changes to the process but not the product. MacLeod, who has held the position of director of the pallet division for North America for the past 26 years, noted that when he began his career, wrapping a pallet of berries and injecting it with the modified atmosphere was a labor-intensive job. There were at least four or five people involved in the process of stacking the trays on the pallet, bagging it, injecting the atmosphere and sealing it.

“The process took at least five minutes for each pallet,” he said. “Today it takes 20 seconds.”

But MacLeod acknowledged that the basic concept is the same, though that’s not for lack of trying. Tectrol is basically carbon dioxide. Over the years, TransFresh has experimented with other atmospheres and other methods of doing the same job, which is achieving optimal quality deliveries at point of destination.

MacLeod said the company continues to explore other options, as it would like to be the first company to bring such a product to market, which could deliver optimal quality for a lower price. It hasn’t happened in the past 40 years and he doubts it will in the next 10 or 20 years. However, he expects there could be some advancements on the system to bring the product directly to the consumer.

Currently, the modified atmosphere works great for arrival to the retailer warehouse. At that point, the pallet is broken down and shipped to individual stores without of the aid of the Tectrol.

MacLeod would like to see more work in that area to extend the optimum atmosphere to the store and even to the home. He said, however, that the expense of that is the prohibitive factor as well as the current process involved in delivering the product from the warehouse to the individual store.

He said that would have to change to maximize the benefits of modified atmospheres on strawberries and other products. He is not sure the will to achieve that exists at this time, but he marvels at the possibility. With no restrictions, he believes far better produce could be delivered to the consumer in their homes.

That quest is precisely what attracted MacLeod to the food industry and enticed him to stay at TransFresh for his entire career. He is retiring for several reasons, none of which involve the job itself.

“People assume that you retire because you are frustrated with the work. That’s not the case,” he said. “I am not bored with the work or the trade. I am going to miss my customers and miss dealing with the problems — and that’s what we do. This is an exciting business. People are honorable to the core. I don’t know where else you get that.”

It was a 4H high school program and then a college summer internship that ultimately led MacLeod to TransFresh. A 4H leadership conference at the University of California-Davis convinced him that is where he wanted to go to college, and he eventually did. After his bachelor’s degree, postharvest work on processing tomatoes at a Hunt-Wesson facility convinced him to pursue his master’s degree in that discipline at UC Davis. That resulted in field work in Salinas with noted researcher Bob Kasmire and a job offer from Jim Lugg of TransFresh when he graduated in 1976. MacLeod started as a field technician, spent time in Europe selling the Tectrol system to customers in Israel and Greece, and worked his way up the ladder doing what he said was very interesting work throughout his career.

TransFresh was originally part of the Bruce Church family companies, which later included Fresh Express, one of the leaders in the value-added packaged salad revolution. While the Tectrol is best noted for its use on strawberries, MacLeod said there were many projects in that family of companies over the years that kept him interested and engaged and on the cutting edge of developing better packaging for fresh produce, including bagged salads and iceless broccoli, to name just a couple of the developments over the years.

But MacLeod said running the pallet division with its profit and loss responsibility — and working with customers — are truly what excited him over the decades. He said changes in the strawberry industry -- most notably the advent of palletization in the late 1960s and early 1970s — was crucial to the long-term success of Tectrol.

But just as important was what TransFresh brought to the table. Initially, the company had no competitors. But even as competition came throughout the years, no one was better at providing the service to the trade more efficiently. Macleod’s keys to success: “Customer is always right; the material is always there; and we are available to help 24/7. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. Yet TransFresh was able to deliver over and over again.”

The longtime executive said a family grape and wine business (MacLeod Family Vineyard) in the Sonoma County area of California, along with aging parents, made this the right time for him to pull back from TransFresh and take a greater share of the family burden that other siblings have been handling over the years.

He does so with no regrets about the career he devoted to the fresh produce industry.