The View’s News – 3rd Quarter 2018
Letter from the President:
The 2018 Orchard View cherry harvest will be remembered for how many good tasting, large cherries were picked, packed and shipped. Quality, and pricing, kept consumers coming back for more of our delicious cherries. Domestic repeat orders helped to offset any anticipated decrease in export fruit to China. Social media was filled with accolades. We received many positive emails and even some congratulatory handwritten letters. Region wide, the 2018 Pacific Northwest cherry crop will be the second largest on record, coming in at 24-25 million boxes. Over the entire season Mother Nature helped our industry by coming through with good cherry growing and harvesting conditions. We had no devastating weather events! I would like to thank everyone at Orchard View for a smooth and successful harvest.
Safety Corner:
Orchard View’s health and safety team would like to thank each and every one of you for your participation in our safety program. Your commitment to following Orchard View’s protocols this harvest season played a large part in the positive results we experienced during the numerous audits and inspections we participated in this year. These included a comprehensive GlobalGap food safety audit, a Costco ethics audit, an Oregon OSHA labor housing inspection and an Oregon OSHA field sanitation inspection. We are very happy to announce that we completed all our audits with only minor issues. This is a marked improvement over the past and demonstrates your dedication to making Orchard View a safe place to work. Keep up the good work!
Packinghouse Post:
Congratulations to all of you on a successful cherry packing season! Next up – prunes and plums. Some interesting facts about this season:
Season – June 6th – July 26th
Number of employees – 202
Total hours worked – 104,500
Bins dumped – 85,581
18# equivalent boxes – 1,127,936 – This is an Orchard View record – most ever packed or shipped!
Trucks loaded – 470
Employee Appreciation Day
THANK YOU!
Orchard Report:
Thank you everyone for your hard work during harvest! This year we started by picking Chelans on June 5th at Milton-Freewater and finished with Sweethearts on July 25th at Wasco and Boyd. That is 51 days of picking! 767 pickers and 151 orchard support staff harvested 2851 acres of cherries into 1,481,684.5 buckets weighing a total of 25,353,590 pounds. Pickers were housed in fourteen different camps.
