Our farm operates year round, indoors, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Only pure water
from the public water supply is used in the growth process; no nutrients are used.
The best way to appreciate what goes on is to show you some pictures of our operation
as shown below:
SPROUTS. Our sprouts are grown in these growing drums, which rotate about twice
an hour, and spray about 15 seconds of water every 20 minutes. Each drum is divided
into quadrants which have spray nozzles enclosed. Each quadrant is planted with
about 10 pounds of seed, which is first cleaned and rinsed thoroughly. In 4 days,
the 10 pounds of seed grows into about 80 pounds of sprouts.
All of Specialty Farms endive and shallots are flown in fresh from California, Canada or Belgium, packed here at Specialty Farms and trucked to our customers normally within 24 hours of packing. Dried fruit is grown in the U.S. while dried mushrooms are selected internationally from only the finest fresh mushrooms. Specialty Farms employee packers are supplemented in packing these items by normally eight individuals from the Kennedy Center, which brings its special needs staff in daily for packing.
The sprouts are then raked out of each quad into harvest carts, which are rolled into the packing room. Using a stainless steel pitchfork, the sprouts are transferred into our 18 foot long, 4 ½ feet high washing tank which contains only pure water. The seed hulls on the sprouts are removed in the wash tank, and the cleaned sprouts go onto a belt at the end of the wash tank, and fall into a clean bin on wheels.
As shown here in our picture of our packing room, the cleaned sprouts are then transferred into a spinner, which removes most excess moisture. The less moisture, the greater the shelf life. The dry sprouts are then transferred to the stainless steel packing table where packers place them into food grade plastic containers, which go down the conveyer belt and are labelled, sell-by dated and palletized. After being palletized, the sprouts are placed in one of our 3 walk-in coolers, and refrigerated at 33 degrees Fahrenheit. Normally, within 24 hours of packing the sprouts are trucked in one of API’s 3 refrigerated trucks to refrigerated supermarket warehouses.
Our tray growing room is used to grow product longer than 4 days, requiring greater length than our normal sprouts. As shown in the picture on the left, food-grade plastic trays are arranged on stainless steel growing racks and watered automatically with an overhead watering system. Our wheatgrass and baby green onion are grown this way, normally over a 7-day period. Both are grown by placing seed on our plastic trays and using only pure water in the growth process. They are packed in an attached packing room separate from our sprout packing room. As with our sprouts, after harvesting all product is placed in our cooler at 33 degrees, and trucked to our customers within 24 hours after harvesting.
PACKING OF ENDIVE, SHALLOTS, DRIED
FRUIT AND DRIED MUSHROOMS.
