$5 Million Project Winding Down At Big Pasco Fruit-Packing Plant

Passers-by can almost hear the growing pains emanating from Douglas Fruit north of town.

But the groans are about to subside at the fruit-packing plant, where a $5 million upgrade and expansion will serve the company’s needs - at least for a while.

“This is a big project for us,” said Holly Douglas, the company’s sales manager. Douglas and her sister, Jill, run the plant for their father, John Douglas, and uncle, Bill Douglas of Yakima.

The project, funded with tax-free industrial revenue bonds from the Port of Pasco’s economic development council, is doubling the plant’s capacity and strengthening its position in the export market.

“We wanted to make these improvements to handle increased production and do a better and more consistent job of waxing, packing and shipping the product,” Holly Douglas said. “It’s going to bring a lot of opportunities both for international and domestic customers.”

After a year on the drawing board, the sketches and plans were transformed into a maze of machines, pulleys and conveyor belts.

The result: a new $1.5 million building that houses a state-of-the-art packing line for apples, nectarines and peaches. The line equipment is worth another $2 million.

The 60,336-square-foot-room was built with special insulation to reduce noise. Skylights invite natural light into the packing room, creating a more pleasurable work environment.

As many as five different grades of fruit can be packed on the new line at once. The packing line is entirely computerized, and the boxes are sorted by different grades and colors to meet buyers’ specifications.”We’re thrilled with the technology,” Douglas said. “We can essentially change the line and its capabilities with the push of a button.”

The fruit is washed, buffed and waxed, then heads to a pre-sorting area where workers remove defects. The product moves through an automatic color sorter and is graded and boxed.

The process saves considerable time since workers no longer have to sort the apples by color and simultaneously remove defective ones.

The line also has six semiautomatic bagging machines for 3-, 5- and 10-pound bags and an automated sticker system to identify apples by variety and retailer code. Stickers were applied by hand on the company’s older packing line.

Adjacent to the new line is a $1.5 million cold storage room capable of storing 100,000 packed boxes of fruit. Workers are putting the finishing touches on the 35,850-square-foot warehouse, which includes a shipping office, truck-receiving area and inspection room.

Now, trucks can pick up loads of fruit directly from the cold storage room at four shipping bays. The company’s existing cold warehouse has only two bays, and fruit must be moved out of refrigeration before it is loaded, which can degrade quality.

The new room is split into 18 cooling zones, allowing storage of peaches and other fruits along with apples at various temperatures.

Where fruit once went immediately into cold storage, packed boxes now will be put into a 24-degree “cool down” room overnight.

With the mid-Columbia fruit industry branching out so quickly, is the expansion large enough for Douglas Fruit?

“We have room to grow,” Holly Douglas said. “Like Jill and I say, ‘You can’t build it big enough.”’