2025 Green Plant of the Year: Fresh Del Monte Produce
Key Takeaways
- Fresh Del Monte's North Portland, Ore., plant was recognized for its innovative food waste reduction strategies driven by engaged employees.
- Training programs, including Gemba walks and idea competitions, led to 197 actionable solutions, with 75% employee participation.
- Future plans include installing LED lighting and improving greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions tracking to further enhance sustainability efforts.
You Selected Fresh Del Monte Produce
Every year, Food Processing accepts nominations from food and beverage processors for our Green Plant of the Year award, and then asks you, our readers, to vote for the plant that you believe deserves the recognition.
This year, Fresh Del Monte won our 15th annual Green Plant of the Year poll, besting very worthy plants from Ajinomoto Foods North America (its Toluca, Ill., plant), Gills Onions (Oxnard, Calif.) and Westrock Coffee Co. (Conway, Ark.). Our thanks to the 867 of you who read through the essays during the month of August and voted.
To read about previous winners, visit our Green Plant of the Year page.
Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc., which processes and provides fresh and fresh-cut fruits and vegetables around the world, takes its role in protecting the environment and providing sustainable products to consumers seriously. The commitment to sustainability extends into its facilities as well, and as Ziad Nabulsi, Fresh Del Monte senior vice president of North America Operations, explains, the company’s employees drive advancement in many cases.
“Sustainability is something our employees are already interested in and committed to,” he says. “So, when we started providing training and education on food loss and waste, they were already engaged and excited.”
That training produced an avalanche of ideas to reduce food waste, including one standout initiative that helped Fresh Del Monte Produce’s North Portland, Ore., processing facility win the 2025 Green Plant of the Year poll from Food Processing magazine.
Employee-driven sustainability
Fresh Del Monte’s entry — one of five nominees this year — noted that the North Portland plant was “a powerful example of what a modern food processing plant can achieve with the help of dedicated, sustainability-minded employees.”
Fresh Del Monte is a signatory of the U.S Food Waste Pact and the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment (PCFWC). Ana Cueva, manager of global sustainability programs, and her team brought back a case study on employee engagement from a working group with the PCFWC. It started with the aforementioned training, which included an informational video, Gemba walks (a Lean and Six Sigma practice) to familiarize employees with all aspects of the plant, games and a competition for ideas, Nabulsi says.
“Having an engaged leader — at our Portland facility, that was Sheri Bueler and Santos Coria — on staff to ensure the project ran smoothly, clear goals to work towards and a company culture that is continuously working towards operating sustainably helped lay the groundwork for this initiative’s success,” he explains. At the end of the six-month program, 197 actionable solutions had been submitted, with 75% of employees contributing some sort of food waste reduction idea.
Of all the proposals, one standout idea was chosen to be piloted at the North Portland plant — a process improvement that ended up recovering 53.2% of fruit (or nearly 4,620 additional finished product units over a five-week period) previously destined for disposal.
An SOP swap
Traditionally, the North Portland quality-assurance team would inspect all inbound fruit in its receiving area before production. Any fruit that did not meet specifications at that point was discarded and sent to farms for feedstock.
The new way of doing things at North Portland was to relocate QA receiving into the production room, which redirected commodities (cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, pineapple and watermelon) to be cleaned and sanitized before inspection.
Nothing changed with regard to fruit inspections themselves, Nabulsi says, except for one key difference: “All parts of the fruit except for the inspected chunks were flowed through the plant’s standard production processes, where the ‘recovered’ fruit was incorporated into sellable goods.”
This product flow became the new standard operating procedure (SOP) for the facility, and adjustments were made to support the change. Signage was used on the production floor to indicate the difference between product waste bins and usable fruit bins, which helped employees transition through the change more easily.
Nabulsi says the success of this program at North Portland gives Fresh Del Monte opportunity to evaluate changing the SOPs for QA inspection of commodities across all plant operations in the future. Furthermore, taking the food waste training and employee engagement initiatives that led to the process improvement to other facilities also has potential. And, some of the additional food waste-reduction ideas that were submitted could very well get their turn to shine for the company.
North Portland potential
Food waste reduction isn’t the North Portland plant’s only award-winning initiative of late. Nabulsi relays that the facility recently received a Silver Award for achieving zero pretreatment violations in 2024, reflecting 100% compliance with the Bureau of Environmental Services Pretreatment Permit.
In practical terms, Nabulsi says, the honor “demonstrates the team’s consistent excellence in managing industrial pollutants responsibly” and “underscores our company’s broader commitment to environmental stewardship.”
Given the successes thus far, Fresh Del Monte has bigger plans for its North Portland facility as well. Nabulsi says the company plans to install LED lighting throughout the processing plant, “an initiative expected to significantly cut electricity consumption and, consequently, reduce Scope 2 emissions associated with energy use.”
Along with other Fresh Del Monte sites, the North Portland plant will assess ways to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through more efficient energy use, and it will collect, analyze and report data the company requires to calculate GHG emissions by 2025, Nabulsi says.
“This effort aligns with the upcoming system transition and upgrade, which will replace the previous Excel-based approach with a new digital solution to enhance accuracy and efficiency in emissions measurement,” he says.
And of course, Fresh Del Monte’s North Portland facility will continue to build off its food waste reduction strategies, looking for additional opportunities to continue to engage its employees and drive up its sustainability successes even further.
About the Author
Andy Hanacek
Senior Editor
Andy Hanacek has covered meat, poultry, bakery and snack foods as a B2B editor for nearly 20 years, and has toured hundreds of processing plants and food companies, sharing stories of innovation and technological advancement throughout the food supply chain. In 2018, he won a Folio:Eddie Award for his unique "From the Editor's Desk" video blogs, and he has brought home additional awards from Folio and ASBPE over the years. In addition, Hanacek led the Meat Industry Hall of Fame for several years and was vice president of communications for We R Food Safety, a food safety software and consulting company.