I'm not sure what they do at the place in Dixon, but it would be a bit easier to get trucks into (one has to drive through city traffic a bit to get to the Sacramento location, where the Dixon plant is outside of a much smaller town) particularly doubles loaded with tomatoes, and the Dixon plant would be closer to present-day fields, too.
There have long been large quantities of "Roma" tomatoes grown in the area with the majority of those going for tomato ketchup. That season has just about ended.
The Dixon site is closer to the produce coming from Salinas, too. I've delivered some loads (broccoli & celery was it?) out of Salinas to the Sacramento Campbell's Soup, once or twice, a couple of years ago now, hauling a typical 53' reefer trailer.
If soup sales are down, I wonder what will happen with the Dixon plant. One might otherwise guess it could be due for expansion (it looks like it has plenty of room for that). Who knows, they may build something additional to take up some of what the Sacramento location has been handling? That, and whatever dehydration processing they chose to do themselves, along the lines of more modern product(?) rather than buy a processed product from others. One thing for certain, trucking costs are a big factor. Water-based product is heavy. When hauling "fresh" produce, it's mainly water, in a sense. Which all adds up to heavy freight cost both in, and out.
Hmmm, I didn't pay close enough attention to the Dixon site when driving by a few times... but there IS a rail line crossing just a few hundred yards down the road. I'm not sure if that's the mainline SP rails, or if it's something of a siding. I do know that just East of there a couple of miles, the Coast Starlight and the more local commuter trains run through (on the SP rails) a couple of miles or so South of Interstate 80 (which skirts Dixon on the North side, for the most part).
Perhaps the trucking issues are part of the problem? Too expensive, for a product which historically relied on low cost and volume sales. I don't *think* train cars still run to the old Sacramento plant...but I do seem to recall some old rails there...
Times change. The fields that once sold their product to the old Sac plant, are now covered in houses, some of them anyway.
Thank you for your post.
I’m reminded of Silicon Valley, which still had patches of farmland in the mid 1990s (remember Olson’s Cherry Orchard?), and about 20 years earlier, all the farmland and greenhouses in Fremont/Newark. Now that area is covered with housing developments and industrial parks.
I was mixed up about the rail lines. On the East side of Dixon, where the newer Campbells is, the tracks are closer to the Interstate. It's on the WEST side, that they are a couple of miles S of the Interstate. That line crosses under the Interstate in Davis, fairly near the 10 year old "Mondavi" Performing Arts Center on the edge of the UC Davis Campus.
Creaky old Magrit Mondavi was just on the front page of the local paper a couple of days ago, celebrating ten years since her and her husband gave large donations to build it --- getting schmoozed by UC types, including Katehi --- who in other recent news just signed off on giving $30,000 pay-outs to the students who got pepper-sprayed last year. What an expensive fiasco... (hey, it's a food product, you could put it on your burrito, hehhehheh...)