Vegetables and Fruits for Lockers

J. S. Caldwell, W. M. Hurst, Harold D. White.

The locker plant is a recent adaptation of mechanical refrigeration for the use of families and individuals in preserving and storing food. It and the home freezer have brought the general practice of preserving food by freezing to towns, the rural communities, and homes.

Although out-of-season and frozen fruits and vegetables are available in local markets, farm people generally prefer to eat their own produce. Patrons of community processing plants usually give one or more of the following reasons: It tastes better; it costs less; the product would go to waste as we don't have enough to sell; or, we can't afford to buy all we need from the store. Agricultural economists sometimes refer to the practice as marketing through processing for home use.

A cold-storage company in California rented space for holding household quantities of meat, game, and fish in boxes under refrigeration in 1908. A few years later, it provided covered boxes with locks for the customers, and in 1917 it constructed and equipped a room with tiers of wooden drawers.

The commercial freezing of small fruits began in the United States about 1905 and that of vegetables about 1929. The industry has had a phenomenal growth. There were more than 11,000 locker plants in the United States in July 1949.

A commercial plant for freezing fruits and vegetables requires a large volume of produce, usually of only a few kinds. To obtain a product of uniform high quality at a reasonable cost, all operations from planting through processing must be mechanized and controlled. The plants normally contract with farmers for the kind and quantity of crops desired and specify the variety, as well as the kind and quantity of fertilizer, when to plant, and when to harvest.

A locker plant must handle a wide variety of products received in small lots with little control over quality and condition when received. Although they began as places to store food under refrigeration, and continue to rely on locker rental as a major source of income, locker plants have taken on many extra services. Auxiliary sources of income are needed because of high building and operating expenses. Many plants perform all the operations in transforming live animals into frozen cuts and such byproducts as lard and sausage. They dress poultry and process fruits and vegetables for their patrons and for sale.

The floor plans of locker plants vary widely, depending partly on the produce handled and on the local practices. However, the floor plan in the drawing of a hypothetical plant shows refrigerated rooms and processing areas common to locker plants. Opinions differ as to the best location and arrangement of the rooms and processing areas for efficient operations. Moreover, the lay-out will depend somewhat on the specialty lines anticipated, such as country-cured hams, berries for making ice cream, frozen fruits and vegetables, or dressed poultry. Locker plants sometimes provide chilling and aging rooms for local meat markets, and bulk frozen-food storage for hotels and restaurants.

In the early days of the locker industry, no sharp-freeze room was provided. The patrons then merely placed packages of food in containers in a room held at a temperature of about 0 F. With this procedure, freezing was slow, and the warm product naturally raised the temperature of surrounding packages. New plants have a room for freezing a product quickly before it is placed in the storage lockers.

The size and type of a freezing unit are determined by the number of lockers in a plant and whether larger-scale commercial freezing is to be done. The unit may be plate, coil, or air-blast. A temperature of at least 0 F. is recommended for the air-blast unit and 10 F. or below for the plate or coil types. Employees like to have convenient access to the sharp-freeze room from the meat-processing area. This usually requires a reach-in door installed to minimize the number of times a day the large door is opened. Or the entrance may be through a refrigerated room or vestibule.

Some States have regulations governing features of plant design and operations affecting sanitation. One requires a separate room or enclosed area for processing meats. A city ordinance may prohibit the slaughtering of animals within the incorporated area. The locker plant then must be located in the country if the abattoir is a part of it.

In a plant like the one in the drawing, meat carcasses received from the farm or abattoir pass through the chilling and aging rooms to the meat-processing area, where regular meat-market equipment is used. Cuts to be frozen are wrapped, labeled, and loaded on freezer trucks or placed directly in the freezer. Other parts of the carcass are routed to appropriate departments. Cuts of meat and other small items that do not require processing are wrapped or put in a container, labeled, and placed directly in the freezer.

Poultry is drawn and dressed in the usual manner and chilled before wrap-Ping and freezing. Some plants chill birds in trays or wire baskets in the chill room; others use cooling racks on casters. Processing equipment in small poultry-dressing plants is commonly used also in locker plants.

For processing fruits and vegetables in a locker plant, operators have been handicapped by the lack of equipment suitable in capacity and price for their use. Machinery used in commercial freezers is generally too large and expensive for intermittent operations on small batches of produce. Often no space in the plant is suitable for processing fruits and vegetables. For these reasons patrons have heretofore been encouraged to do their processing at home.

Whether fruits and vegetables should be processed in the plant depends on whether the plant is in town or in the country and on such local conditions as size of town, relative proportion of rural and urban patrons, crops produced, and facilities in the home for processing. Patrons who freeze small quantities of a few products, like strawberries, corn, and beans or peas from a garden, often prefer to do the processing at home when the crops are at the peak of condition or when time permits. Those who buy their produce for freezing in wholesale units and farmers or gardeners with relatively large quantities prefer to process at the plant or have the plant staff do the job. Two advantages in having a room for processing at the plant are that the work can be done under supervision and the management can take advantage of market conditions for buying and processing produce for patrons and for sale locally. With some crops and under certain circumstances, the locker plants can compete with commercial freezers, even though the processing is done largely by hand.