Pacific AgPak warehouse in Watsonville improves customer service
Pacific AgPak warehouse in Watsonville improves customer service
It has been two years since Pacific AgPak, a leading provider of plastic consumer packaging for strawberries and other produce, relocated from Exeter, CA, to a new 50,000-square-foot facility in Watsonville. The facility has enabled Pacific AgPak to improve customer service and reduce turn-around times for strawberry shippers, according to President Dave Baum.
“We have grown quite a bit” since making the move, he said Feb. 4. “We are offering custom labeling for our customers with eight labeling lines,” and the warehouse provides the capacity to be able to store inventory for customers.
Typically, “we will take projections from the customers and build 50 percent of their needs and store it on the floor for the, so there is always inventory on the floor for quick turn-around times,” Baum said. The company also has its own trucks, which it uses to make deliveries “up and down the California coast. This enables us to act quickly for the customers” with around-the-clock service seven days a week.
The opening of the Watsonville facility also entailed the hiring of 36 additional people “to support our operation,” he said.
In addition to improving service and reducing turn-around time, “we have come up with some new packaging,” Baum, said. One item is “the new smooth-wall one-pound clamshell. That helps in showing the berries off” by giving them better visibility. More recently, “we have also come out with a new two-pound clamshell” in the smooth-wall concept as well as a new smooth-wall clamshell designed specifically for long-stem strawberries.
For customers who are looking to increase the amount of product they can put on a truck per cubic foot of trailer space, “we can work on an eight-down one-pound and two-pound clamshells that help give higher cubes for the strawberry industry,” he said. “These eight-down clamshells … help receivers save potentially 33 percent on their freight” and can also help growers “increase their sales by 33 percent” by adding extra layers of product to the pallet.
Currently, “we are doing some testing … on an eight-down, two-pound, single-layer clamshell that will work for long-stems as well,” he added.
All of the clamshells are made with at least 80 percent recycled PET plastic such as water bottles, he said. The RPET has high clarity, giving the berries inside the clamshells high visibility at retail.
