Flavor 1st can track the produce that customers receive down to the farm, what field it came from, the date it was picked along with any and all maintenance for that field, and now they can also package twice as fast as they had before.

The company added 40,000 square feet to its building in Mills River, NC, and also installed a brand new Aweta line.

“It has a camera system that sorts by color and by size, and it allows us to mechanize our packingline a lot better to make sure our packs are more consistent,” said Mike Porter, who works in sales at Flavor 1st.

New machinery at Flavor 1st enables the company to package product twice as fast as before.Porter said the implementation of the new machinery that was installed Jan. 1 is going very well. “It’s a huge investment when you consider everything we did between machinery and adding on the building. The main reason we did it is to improve the quality and consistency in our packaging.

“We love the new machine,” he continued. “We are learning on a daily basis some of the things it can do that we didn’t even realize. Things like just the speed and efficiency in which we can work are a big key.”

Porter said they previously had packing machinery, but this line is much better and includes the latest technology.

“And a larger machine that can handle more capacity, ” he said. “Our packaging, and our efficiency, doubled. If we were doing 600 cases an hour, now we can do 1,200 cases.”

Porter said labor savings is one of the biggest benefits of the new machinery. “I think biggest thing it helps us with is with labor, the ability for our people to get in and out. They used to work 12-14 hours a day, now the machinery allows our people to have a better quality of life and spend more time with their families.”

Flavor 1st offers a full line of vine-ripe tomatoes. “We have farms or farm ourselves, from Homestead, Florida, all the way to Ohio,” Porter said. “We also have a full line of what I like to call ‘southern veg,’ which is beans, squash, eggplant, Bell pepper cucumbers and okra. And we are also heavily involved in SM Jones, a corn deal out of Belle Glade, Florida.”

Flavor 1st is also the exclusive sales agent of Green Circles Farms, a corn deal out of Bainbridge, GA. It is the sales agent for a lot of farms on the vegetable piece, with farms in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Georgia.

There are also some new faces at Flavor 1st. Nick Lyons started last November as the new procurement manager. “He is involved in procurement any time we need to go outside of our own farms to buy tomatoes,” said Porter.

Two other new employees are Kevin Campbell, who is a procurement assistant, and Chris Gach, a new sales assistant. Campbell and Gach started with the company in January.