COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — If a diner went to a restaurant and found brown lettuce or a green tomato in his salad, he would send it right back to the kitchen. That’s the assumption of one Colorado company specializing in making and delivering fresh salads across the Southwest.
“Anything sent back is a killer,” said Don Chrisman, production supervisor in the tomato division of Fresh Express. “The whole idea is to make sure the product is 100% what the customer wants it to be.”
From its kitchen in this Rocky Mountain city, Fresh Express produces and hauls packaged salad kits and tomatoes from the truckloads of farm goods that arrive each day at its processing facility. Its product line includes traditional garden salads, salad blends and Caesar salads.
In the race against time and freshness, the company puts its faith in equipment, especially the refrigerated units used to deliver the salads to customers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
“If a prepacked salad comes back, you lose everything,” Chrisman said. “You lose the labor on it, you lose the shipping on it and you lose the product because you can’t rerun a processed product” that is dated.
“There is really no margin for error” in this business, said William Stevenson, president of the company.
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