PIRU : Fruit Packer Selling Tons to Pacific Rim

Tucked away in the tiny town of Piru is a multimillion-dollar industry with an international market.

An average of 1,000 trucks stop each month at the Fillmore-Piru Citrus Assn. packing plant on Main Street. Up to 20 tons of premium fruit departs Piru in each load, bound for destinations as distant as Singapore and Malaysia.

“We’re very aggressive in targeting Pacific Rim markets,” said association President Ken Creason, noting that Ventura County citrus is so popular in Japan that the FPCA provides copies of its brochure printed in Japanese.

The original packing plant of the 94-year-old association was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in 1966.

Much of the operation seems typical of today’s factories. Conveyor belts rumble from room to room, and a busy fleet of forklifts empties 1-ton “field boxes” of fruit into a giant hopper. On an average day, the packinghouse processes about 700,000 pounds of oranges.

Some equipment is specific to the industry. A computerized sizing device scans each orange with an electronic eye, determining in seconds its diameter. The machine flips the piece on to the appropriate conveyor belt and relays up-to-the minute data to a central computer.

The perfume of oranges is everywhere, from the holding rooms where field boxes are stacked according to the ranch where they were filled, to the chilling rooms, where 40-pound cartons of fruit await shipment. In the wash and wax room, a different odor pervades the atmosphere.

“It’s sodium lauryl sulfate--the same thing used as a base for nearly every shampoo on the market,” said Ralph Holland, the resident chemist.

The association belongs to Sunkist Growers, which markets the citrus.

Creason spends about a quarter of his time in the field, visiting with the association’s member growers.

More than 460 ranches totaling 10,000 acres keep the packing plant open year-round. During the peak Valencia season between May and October, the Fillmore plant is open for business as well.

Technology and marketing have reshaped much of the citrus business Creason knew in the late 50s, when he worked in orchards as a teen-ager.

But despite the progress he has seen in more than 30 years with the industry, one thing remains the same: Oranges are still plucked from the tree by hand.