What could be the next innovations, in terms of technological innovation or in terms of products?
One of the things that is going to need to happen for the future of the California processing industry to stay as bright as I previously indicated is making sure that we remain an efficient and cost-effective producer of tomatoes. If one looks at the tomato yield per acre from 2024 back to 1995, there's been big productivity increases, but not recently. In fact, it has been essentially flat in the past 10-ish years. Input costs for harvesting and growing tomatoes are going to continue to increase, things are going to continue getting more expensive, so the growers need to be making money, they need to be healthy, processors need to be making money, and our customers need to be making money, so really for the first part of the supply chain, the growers need to be as efficient and effective as possible.
A lot of those yield gains came from the introduction of drip irrigation but now that the juice has been squeezed there, 99% of people are using drip irrigation, so the industry needs to figure out other ways of getting more productive. Luckily, there's a lot of interesting things happening on the varietal development side, gene editing, things like that. Everybody's favorite buzzword these days is artificial intelligence and what can be done there and there's a lot to be said for applications of AI in farming practices as well as factory operations, looking at, for example, talking about color sorters and looking at other ways to keep foreign material out of your product or to keep your plants running as efficiently as possible, so those things and then other ways to keep labor as efficient and productive as possible at the field level, automatic transplanting, the introduction of more robotics… I think the answers I just gave could probably be applied to a lot of agricultural or manufacturing industries but the “easy gain” that drip irrigation provided, we've got to find something else because the productivity per acre for the California tomato processing industry, we've got to find a way to continue to increase that, because costs are going to continue to increase.
And in the factory, do you see any innovation? Since aseptic was the last big innovation, there's since been just a few improvements, more energy efficiency, but there doesn’t seem to be anything really new?
There’s a lot of different technologies that may be more energy efficient. The industry around the globe still uses a lot of fossil fuels, obviously, to boil the water to create the steam to evaporate the water out of the tomatoes, so there's nothing major on that front that I'm personally aware of. I am not as operations focused as some, and I don't want to insult anybody who's working on these things, but from my perspective, when I hear that question, I'm focused mostly on what we can do in the field. Because the more efficient growers are, the better they can do, and for the long-term viability of the industry, every player in the chain has to be healthy.
Last question on sustainability: what actions have you taken, or what are you implementing in this field?
The crown jewel of our sustainability program is our artificial marsh. We use our artificial marsh to treat and ultimately reuse a lot of the water that we use during our production process. The artificial marsh, which is a system of interlocking ponds, is filled with specific types of aquatic vegetation that break down the biological material (tomato sediment) found in our rinse water. For example, from 2013 to 2021, we recycled on average 56 million gallons of water each tomato season. Last year we did 116 million gallons! We make adjustments to the system every year in an effort to make it more efficient. Additionally, the marsh supports a host of wildlife plants, animals and there's a large waterfowl population.
Another benefit of the artificial marsh is that by treating the water in the way that we are, through this natural process, we are avoiding the emissions that would have been incurred had we gone through the municipal standard treatment system. Not only are we saving water, but we are also avoiding creating a significant amount of emissions, through our natural process. We have someone on staff whose full-time job essentially is to take care of the marsh, and we developed it over the last 10 plus years. It's something that we're all very proud of and it's more than just a nice talking point, it's something that actually is material to what we do. 

From Xinjiang tomato paste