From Davis fields to Dixon plant, Campbell's product is local

From Davis fields to Dixon plant, Campbell's product is local
By Jonathan Edwards | McNaughton Newspapers | October 16, 2009 23:24

DAVIS - If Campbell's Soup had to pick one of the 3,141 counties in the country most important to making its iconic Tomato Soup, it probably would choose Camden County in New Jersey, where the soup was born more than a century ago.

Yolo County, however, would be a close second -- maybe even No. 1 -- because it plays a key role in nearly every step of production from seed to spoon, as the Campbell's folks like to say. Here in Yolo (and its borderlands), researchers invent the tomato seeds; farmers grow the crop; factory workers process the tomatoes, ship the paste and label the can; and people eat the soup.

Davis is of particular importance. The processing, or canning, tomato -- churned by processors such as Campbell's into tomato paste, which is then used to make everything from pizza sauce to salsa -- got a new life mid-century, when UC Davis plant breeders invented a variety that could stand up to mechanical harvesting.

Before that breakthrough, farmworkers walked the rows, hand-picking tomatoes multiple times as the fruit ripened over what might be a 30-day season. The advent of the super tomato -- dubbed VF145 -- cut the time down to one day by condensing the window that tomatoes in any given field would ripen. As they ripened together, a mechanical harvester could pass through in a single day and harvest everything at once.

The invention revolutionized the industry, said Gene Miyao, vegetable crops adviser for the Yolo County UC Cooperative Extension program. Before the mechanically harvested canning tomato came out of UCD, California was a major player in processing tomatoes, Miyao said. Today, it still dominates the nation's canning tomato industry with 90 percent of the market share.

'California became the real leader,' said Miyao, who is known as 'Mr. Tomato.'

A decade before mechanical harvesting got going, Campbell's already had decided to make California's Central Valley, not New Jersey, ground zero of its tomato farming operations.

So, in 1948, Campbell's built its Agricultural Research Center on County Road 104, just south of present-day city limits. Sixty years later, it's still there, its workers trying to create the perfect seed to make the perfect tomatoes for the perfect paste that will make the perfect soup.

Campbell's is more than a soup, however. It's an idea, an icon made famous by Andy Warhol's pop art, by longevity and by 112 years of eating and advertising. People see Campbell's and they think childhood; they think their children; they think 'M'm M'm good!'

Which is good for Yolo County, whose cash crop -- processing tomatoes -- brought the county $105 million last year.

But that figure is just for the raw crop; an entire industry orbits the canning tomatoes.

'Those tomato growers are doing business with the fertilizer company and the tractor supply companies,' said Tim Gruenwald, director of agriculture for Campbell's. 'And we're doing extensive business with transportation networks and local warehousing facilities.'

By buying tomatoes, Campbell's pumps $70 million to $80 million into the Sacramento Valley, Gruenwald said. That, he added, 'has a huge trickle-down effect on the local economy.'

Inventing seeds

The Agricultural Research Center seems almost an accident, tucked away on a two-lane road south to nowhere. But it's been there the better part of a century, sitting at the front end of a years-long process to make the perfect soup tomato.

It starts not with seeds, but with 80 million tomato flowers each year; flowers that workers hand-pollinate, crossbreeding and crossbreeding and crossbreeding to find a super tomato that can, among other things, tough it out in the bottom of a big rig, fight insects and mold, balance a soup with a high fruit-to-juice ratio, and taste great.

Pollinated flowers yield 300 to 500 new tomato breeds. Campbell's ultimately picks one -- maybe two -- to test in the field. The variety known as 'CXT55' made the cut because it produced high yields while weathering wet, sunny field conditions for long periods of time without rotting. CXT55 also packed high solids for processors, which makes the best paste.

But an untested lab seed doesn't go straight to the field, or even to commercial-scale production in a greenhouse. The new variety must prove itself in real-life conditions -- small plots carved out and surrounded by farmland. There are a number of trials going on in Yolo County right now, Gruenwald said.

The hopeful seed must hurdle one last test. Looking at data, researchers at the center team up with Gruenwald to yay or nay distribution to Campbell's farmers.

If the seed gets the OK, Campbell's starts handing it out around mid-December. Some go to farmers to plant directly. The vast majority, about 80 percent, make a preliminary stop at a greenhouse, which uses the seeds to start growing tomato plants. Farmers then move these 'transplants' out to fields and stick them in the ground. The two-step process, Gruenwald said, saves money and reduces the amount of pesticides required to kill weeds.

Growing tomatoes

Not all transplants go out to the field at once. Campbell's, like processors around California, contracts with different growers to harvest crops at different times. Because a cannery can handle only so many tomatoes at one time, processors stagger plantings -- some as early as February, others as late as May -- so they can keep a steady, but not overwhelming, crop flowing to their plants.

'It's an orchestration,' Gruenwald said.

Aug. 19 was the magic day for Tom Galindo and his 140-acre field just south of Davis, less than a mile from the Campbell's R&D center. He farms about 1,000 acres of tomatoes for Campbell's, with whom he's worked 30-plus years.

Over the chunk-a-chunk-a-chunk whirring of the harvester, which lifted and lobbed tomatoes into a tractor-trailer at its heel, Galindo talked about harvest like he's taking his team to the postseason.

'This is our business time of year,' he shouted over the harvester. 'This is what it's all about. You work all year to get to this point.'

Later, Manuel Estrada, a farm laborer for Galindo, stood guard on the harvester, looking for rejects as tomatoes zipped by.

'Any dirt, moldy tomatoes,' Galindo explained, 'we don't want.'

Getting the tomatoes off the ground and up to Estrada is easier than ever because of crossbreeding, said David Viguie, who, like Galindo, farms about 1,000 acres for Campbell's. To demonstrate, Viguie pulled off a tangle of vines. He held the mass up and let it drop slightly before yanking upward.

Dozens of red, ripe tomatoes fell to the earth. That, Viguie concluded, makes harvesting easy, and it's all the result of creating seeds like CXT55.

Campbell's created a breed where 95 percent to 100 percent of the tomatoes in any given field ripen simultaneously. And when they do, they fall off the vine.

'We expect a lot out of these tomatoes,' Gruenwald said. ' (They're) tough.'

Processing tomatoes

That means they can withstand the 8-mile jaunt to Campbell's cannery in Dixon. After catching the tomato rain dropped by Galindo's harvester, a Valley Farm Transport tractor-trailer pulled off a dirt road and turned south on County Road 104.

Two miles later, the truck took a right turn onto Tremont Road, where it passed tomato and safflower fields. Six miles later it hit Sparling Lane in Dixon, a frontage road running parallel to Interstate 80. Other tomato trucks whizzed by. Then, hauling its 25-ton load, the big rig pulled into Campbell's processing plant.

A water gun attacked, hitting tomatoes and pushing them off the truck and into a steel chute.

The Dixon cannery combines Willy Wonka's chocolate factory with the board game Mouse Trap. Inside and out, a maze of chutes, pipes, tubes, tumblers and conveyor belts moved tomatoes, their juice and tomato paste from one end of the 13,000-square-foot complex to the next.

Tomatoes flowed down steel rivers and dropped out of sight, crept up conveyor belts, dancing and jiggling, and were picked up and dropped by a tireless wheel of buckets. Anonymous workers in white sanitary caps hovered, spotting and pulling rejects.

And then there was the noise. Things whirred; things dinged -- something bonked. And over everything the constant hissing roar dominated the building like one endless jet takeoff.

The whole process is designed to take a tomato off the truck, wash it a couple of times, remove the seeds and peel and mash it into juice. In between, a tomato goes through 'hot break,' where heat fixes the amount of tomato's pectin, which determines how thick the resultant tomato paste will be. When a product like Prego pasta sauce calls for a richer, heartier sauce, the paste needs more pectin. On the other hand, the small amount of pectin in V8 juice thins it out into a drink.

Then Campbell's reduces the juice over low heat to turn it into paste. After a $23 million renovation last winter, the Dixon plant boosted the amount of tomatoes it can handle by 15 percent. At the height of the season, the plant now receives 240 to 270 truckloads a day, or between 12 million and 13.5 million pounds. In a 90-day season, that's as much as 1.2 billion pounds.

Those tomatoes make between 76 million and 86 million pounds of tomato paste each year, which huge filler hoses squirt into 55-gallon drums or 300-gallon bins. The containers get sealed, loaded on to trains and trucks and shipped across the country.

Making soup

After the paste leaves processing plants like the one in Dixon, Campbell's ships it to 'thermal manufacturing locations' throughout the United States and Canada, including one in Sacramento. There, workers and machines transform the paste into, among other things, tomato soup. They can the soup, striping it with the label made famous by Warhol and recognizable to the 25 million people that, according to company numbers, buy Campbell's tomato soup regularly.

Some paste goes to Tom Helsel, Campbell's senior research chef in Camden, N.J.

Helsel and his team use it to create new soups. His biggest project in the last couple years, however, has been making the old new, while, at the same time, trying to keep it old. Campbell's wanted to make a healthier tomato soup by reducing salt by 32 percent. But -- and this is key, Helsel said -- Campbell's didn't want to change the taste.

So Campbell's trucked in sea salts from around the world -- from the Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean and Himalayas -- hoping one would add flavor while decreasing sodium. Some, Helsel explained were too chalky, too metallic or left too strong an aftertaste. He eventually found one he liked -- whose origin is a secret. Despite making healthier soup, Campbell's is keeping the change quiet.

'You can't change what has become an icon,' Helsel said, 'because no one's banging on the door saying, 'You've got to change this.' '

Eating soup

By the time Sharon Cain went to the South Davis Safeway to pick up a half-dozen cans of Campbell's tomato soup in late September, the low-sodium version already was on the shelf.

She hadn't noticed a change in taste; she's still a big fan. Over the years, she's found Campbell's tomato soup versatile. Throw it over some meat loaf to moisten it up, or toss some fresh vegetables into the soup to give it some texture.

It's practical, sure, but it also brings back the snowy Saturday mornings of her Midwest childhood. After a hard couple of hours sledding down the rolling hills in Ohio, she would be called inside by her mom, Cain said, smiling, staring back decades.

A warm, steaming bowl of tomato soup was waiting. 'It's homey; it's comforting; it's really good,' Cain said. 'It just makes you feel warm inside.'

Reach Jonathan Edwards at jedwards@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8052.