Bringing Garden Fresh technology to others – Crain’s Detroit Business

Garden Fresh founder Jack Aronson is bringing to metro Detroit the preservation technology that enabled him to take his salsa global and offering an avenue to similar success to other food makers.

That will help companies like Ferndale juice maker Drought, which now has to ship its products to Milwaukee for processing. Local processing will make national expansion more affordable.

Aronson and a minority partner are investing $5.5 million to install the state's first high-pressure processing operation open to other companies, in a former Garden Fresh Gourmet building in Taylor. It will be only the 13th such line in the country, according to the state.

The process subjects fresh, refrigerated foods to extreme pressure, which kills germs and extends shelf life by months without cooking or preservatives. That helps fresh producers capitalize on growing consumer demand for fresh food. It's the technology that made Garden Fresh more similar to homemade salsa than its jarred counterparts.

The $5.5 million project operating as Great Lakes HPP will include a new innovation center and lab to help up-and-coming fresh food producers decide if high-pressure processing is right for their product, and access to the expertise Aronson and his team have developed from experience at Garden Fresh.

Having the operation nearby will cut processing costs for Aronson's own Clinton Township-based Clean Planet Foods meat company and others like raw juice maker Drought by nearly half by eliminating the shipping fees they now pay to have their products processed in Milwaukee, the nearest similar operation.

Aronson expects the innovation center to open in a month and the processing line to be up and running by Nov. 1.

"I had HPP with Garden Fresh, which helped us grow not only regionally and nationally but globally," he said.

"We were the largest fresh salsa company in the world right out of Ferndale, and HPP made that possible."

Two HPP lines at Ferndale-based Garden Fresh transferred to New Jersey-based Campbell Soup Co. (NYSE: CPB) with the 2015 sale of the company. But even Campbell is sending some of its fresh products to Wisconsin to go through HPP because it doesn't have the capacity it needs here, Aronson said.

"I love what's been happening in food processing, and I feel like we (Garden Fresh) have been a small part of that," he said.

The new operation, which is expected to create 25-30 jobs, garnered a $150,000 grant from the Michigan Commission of Agriculture and Rural Development in July, as one of the first incentives in a pilot incentive program launched by the state agriculture department (see story Page 3).

"There's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a month leaving Michigan, going somewhere else," Aronson said. "Now we can bring this all in-state."

He owns 90 percent of Great Lakes; a silent partner owns the rest.

A 30,000-square-foot building on Trolley Industrial Drive near I-94 will house the HPP line. It was formerly a distribution site for Garden Fresh products, and Campbell Soup continued to operate from there for a time after it bought Garden Fresh.

Campbell vacated the building recently after constructing a new warehouse in Ferndale, leaving two "football-field-sized" walk-in coolers that are perfect for storing food going through the HPP process, Aronson said, and four loading docks.

The site has space for four HPP lines, but initial plans call for installation of a single line that would have capacity to process 45 million pounds of food per year.

When complete, the HPP line will be able to take small runs as well as large runs, given that it uses only cold water to process foods and won't need to go through costly cleanings in between product runs, Aronson said.

The process does change some some attributes of the food, he said. "What we noticed is it makes jalapenos hotter, so I had to put less in (salsa.) And it made garlic weaker. I had to put more garlic in."

The process can't be used for products in glass and doesn't work well for breads and breakfast sandwiches, Aronson said. Dips work great, but after they go through HPP, they may leach a little liquid around the edges.

"That's what I'll help them with. I'll tell them here's the food starch you want to use because it's all natural, and it's really attractive on your label. ... You don't want to add something with five ingredients. We can help them that way without having to experiment at home for a month or five months."

The process has helped Drought expand its distribution throughout the Midwest over the past eight months, said Jessie James, chief business development officer of Drought and one of the four sisters who founded the company six years ago.

Aronson gave the fledgling company the opportunity to experiment with his HPP machines at Garden Fresh, and testing showed the process extended the shelf life of its products from three to five days to 75-90, she said, though the company doesn't sell products past 40 days.

Between the addition of a new, 15,000-square-foot production site now under construction in Berkley and reducing costs with Great Lakes HPP, the company expects to increase its revenue by 40 percent in the coming year.

Over 80 retailers nationally are interested in selling Drought, James said. And Aronson's new line will make that possible.

"You're able to make a really fresh, great product without adding any preservatives," she said. "This technology is revolutionary."

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Bringing Garden Fresh technology to others - Crain's Detroit Business