Earthbound Farm was recently spotlighted in an interview with Good Morning America's Senior Health and Medical Editor, Dr. Richard Besser. The farm's food safety initiatives are well worth applause.
Earthbound Farm is
headquartered in San Juan Bautista, California and is the nation’s largest
grower, packer, and shipper of organic produce. With approximately 150
designated farms, 1,000 employees, and over 33,000 acres of farmland,
Earthbound Farm works to produce healthy, organic food while making a positive
impact on the environment. Earthbound Farm is widely recognized for its tender
leaf, fresh-cut salads found in many grocery stores nationwide.
Earthbound Farm is a
signatory to the California and Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements (LGMAs).
The LGMAs were established to ensure that growers of lettuces and other greens
are following best practices for protecting their healthy crops from contamination.
Adherence to the standards is regularly audited. Earthbound Farm also complies
with several customer standards and is looking to move to an ISO certification.
In an effort to ensure that only safe products reach consumers, Earthbound Farm has overhauled its food safety program, and with that comes an increase in documentation.
According to Will Daniels,
VP of Quality, food safety, and organic integrity, Earthbound Farm “generated
thousands of pages of documents every week to keep the system going. Before we
started using Qualtrax, our system was based entirely on paper documents and,
frankly, we used too much paper. Now that we’re paperless, we are doing the
environment a favor and we’re more efficient, too.”