A Plant Loaded With Vitamin C
At the Villa Park Orchards packinghouse in Orange, time moves with the seasons. March heralds the arrival of the year’s Valencia oranges. Grapefruit begins to show up in May. November means navels.
Orange County in the late 1940s boasted more than 65,000 acres of orange groves and about four dozen packing plants. Today, it’s easier to find an orange tree at Home Depot than one of the county’s small, remaining orchards. And only one packinghouse survives.
For nearly a century, under two owners, the packing plant on Cypress Street has been to oranges what Willy Wonka’s factory was to chocolate. Between 500,000 and 900,000 pounds of citrus arrive each day from the San Joaquin Valley and San Diego and Ventura counties, a cascade of orange orbs on a journey from tree limb to tabletop.
Once unloaded, the fruit is washed, waxed and sent onto an ear-splitting freeway of conveyor belts where it is sorted by quality and size and packed into cardboard crates. After a couple of days in a cavernous cooler, it’s hauled away by truck. Of the 4 1/2 million cartons processed each year, 80% winds up in Asia.
“Japan wants more rough fruit. Why, I don’t know,” said operations manager Emma Avalos. “Hong Kong wants them really smooth, really nice -- the best. Malaysia takes a lot of small sizes.... Taiwan wants straight ‘38s” -- shorthand for 138 pieces of fruit per box. “They don’t want any other sizes. Bangladesh wants ‘38s, ‘63s. Second-grade only.”
Avalos has learned the trade one orange at a time, moving from packer to sorter and eventually into management. Her mother and father had worked at Villa Park for a decade -- she was a grader, he a machine operator -- when Emma came to work at the age of 19. That was 30 years ago -- a tenure that’s not unusual at the packinghouse, where most of the 70 or so permanent employees have logged more that two decades on the job. Recently, a woman retired after 54 years of packing.
As a packer, Avalos had a reputation for speed, once filling 700 crates in a day.
“Emma was the fastest packer in the state of California,” said Butch Leichtfuss, 63, who until last year was Villa Park Orchard’s president.
The Leichtfuss family has orange juice running in its veins. Butch’s dad, Laurence, worked for the co-op for 50 years, the last 25 as president. Butch’s son Brad is the current president, and his two other sons also work for Villa Park Orchards.
Butch Leichtfuss grew up in Orange and was 16 when he started in the fruit business.
“You can’t even envision it anymore. There was nothing here but citrus groves,” he said.
“Everything here was done by hand, no machines. Ice was used in the rail cars to keep the oranges cold. We’d pack the ends of the cars with 300 pounds of ice. Everything was packed in 70- and 80-pound wooden boxes.”
The wooden boxes that bore the distinctive art of the various brand names -- Rooster and Mohawk, Bird Rocks and Pala Brave -- were replaced by cardboard containers in the 1950s, about the same time as the county’s groves began to be uprooted for subdivisions.
Leichtfuss remembers burying huge stacks of useless labels, thousands and thousands of them. When the crate art became a valuable collector’s item about a decade ago, Leichtfuss exhumed his trove, only to find that it had become one with the soil.
Today, each orange is examined by a computerized camera that instantaneously determines whether the fruit is first-grade or meant for juice. Blemished, bruised or misshaped oranges are ejected by tiny arms that flip them into the second-grade bin. The nice, round, smooth ones continue down the line.
The computer catches only 60% of the inferior fruit. The rest is caught, as it always has been, by hand.
“We don’t want to give the computer the whole job because we just don’t trust it,” said Keith French, a 48-year-old exchange manager who grew up a few blocks away and started working at the packinghouse when he was 21. “You can’t afford to make any mistakes with the growers’ fruit.”
As Orange County’s groves disappeared, so did its packers. Villa Park survived because it followed the growers, first to San Diego County and later to the Central Valley. About 30 years ago, the co-op became an innovator in the export business, keeping it competitive.
A few years ago, Villa Park opened a second plant in Ventura County. How long its Orange facility will keep churning out fruit is in question. Nearby Chapman University could use the land to expand, and the co-op has discussed a sale.
Butch Leichtfuss insists with a smile that any sale is far in the future and that Orange County’s last touchstone to its former fame isn’t closing any time soon.
“We don’t own it; it’s owned by the growers,” he said of the packinghouse that has been overseen by three generations of his family.
“But we feel like it’s part of our family. Unfortunately, it’s all any of us know how to do. And it’s kind of a dying industry.”
