A little over a year ago, Veggies Inc. relocated to a new 25,000-square-foot facility, 75 percent larger than the company’s previous facility, that includes offices and a fully refrigerated warehouse with 13 loading doors, compared to just eight at the previous location, according to Marco Barrerda, vice president of the company.

The new facility has enabled Veggies Inc. to increase its cross-docking and sales business, Barreda said. “For that, we had to increase, as well, our fleet of trucks,” he said. “We added a couple of refrigerated bobtails and a couple of semis as well.”

The larger facility and increased business have also necessitated adding more employees including “some QC people, some other warehouse personnel, and administrative and office personnel,” he said.

“All of this helped us increase our production business, otherwise known as repack,” Barreda said. That business has increased by 30 percent since moving into the new facility.

Mike Vohland, Marco Barreda and Luis Valenzuela of Veggies Inc. (Photo by John Groh)“We are now running two production lines, which allows us to provide private label packaging in many presentations” such as bags, overwrapped trays and clamshells, he said.

“Our newest addition” to the line is “a couple of overwrapping machines. We are now providing that service to different customers. We are overwrapping all kinds of produce on trays of different sizes.” Most of that is being done in private labels.

Besides packaging individual commodities, “we do combinations of items as well,” Barreda said. Examples are a combination pack of yellow and green squash and a salsa pack consisting of tomatoes and chilis.

The company also continues, in its repack operation, to provide reconditioning and resizing services, he said. Customers for the repack/production services are either “our own personal retail customers that we go direct to” or companies that sell to retailers, he said.

Veggies Inc. continues to do “our normal sales, besides what we do with production,” buying for customers from many different distributors, Barreda said. “That is our bread and butter.”

In the past, Veggies Inc. was “a seasonal company out of Nogales,” but during the off-season “we kept loading in Texas and California,” he said. However, “with all this new production equipment and all of these new changes, as of last year, we became a year-round company out of Nogales.”

The company now does cross-docking, for example, for mangos, which keep going all summer long, he said. In addition, “we keep providing the production services like the trays and bags and clamshells” year-round, working with product that is brought in from either California or Texas during the Nogales off-season. That helps make the company’s Nogales operation a year-round business and “keep a lot of our work force on the job” instead of having to lay them off temporarily during the summer,” he said.