I am sure you are all familiar with the purple cabbage pieces that are included in many common salad mixes. For this week’s post, we get to see how cabbage is processed, sliced and washed, straight from the source! All of this footage was taken at the Gold Coast Packing processing facility (Fresh Venture Foods) in Santa Maria, California, showing how their 8 ounce purple cabbage packs are created.
Table of Contents
How Bagged Cabbage is Made
- Coring – Upon arrival to the facility, the harvested heads of cabbage have either already been cored in the field or are cored during the initial step of the processing operation. The bins that arrived the day of my visit were already cored in the field. After the bins are dumped onto the line, the workers visually inspect the cabbage to remove any damaged outer leaves before the product proceeds to the processing step.
- Processing – The heads of cabbage pass through a slicing machine, where they are chopped to the size outlined in the customer’s specification.
- Conveyor Line – The sliced pieces of cabbage then float through the conveyor line in a sanitized wash water on their way to the spin dryer.
- Wash Tank – The circular tank in the middle of the cabbage processing line is the wash tank, where sanitizer is administered to the wash water.
- Drying – The spin dryer dries the cabbage and then sends it up on another conveyor line to a multi head weighing machine.
- Weighing Machine – The multi head weighing machine weighs out the correct amount of product to be packed into each retail pack.
- Automated Packing – The allotted amount of product drops down from the weighing machine to the automated packing machine, where the sliced cabbage is machine packed and sealed into bags.
- Metal Detector – The packed bags pass through a metal detector prior to final packing.
- Final Packing – The completed cabbage packs are packed into boxes and palletized to prepare for shipment.
Cabbage Processing Video
You can see the full overview of the process in the following video.
Food Safety Considerations
For a cabbage processing operation, some of the main food safety concerns are:
- Testing and changing of the wash water – The cabbage is exposed to recycled wash water (where it isn’t changed between the loads), so there needs to be a constant testing of the wash water and change out when required.
- Cleaning and sanitation of the processing equipment – The majority of this operation is performed by machinery, and there is a lot of machinery, so it is important that all of this be cleaned and sanitized frequently (e.g., between shifts, daily).
- Glove policy – Since gloves are required, there needs to be a glove policy enforced. This means that the gloves are controlled by the company, and that they are changed out appropriately.
There are many more items to be taken into consideration, but this is just a brief list to get you thinking about it!
Featured Grower Information
I would like to thank Gold Coast Packing and Fresh Venture Foods for the tour and for allowing the gathered content to be shared. Gold Coast Packing is a vegetable grower, based out of Santa Maria, California, with cauliflower, broccoli and spinach among the products they grow, pack and process.
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