Continuous Improvement: Our Sustainability Journey - 2022 Updates

Our Mission

We are a world-class company that prepares safe, consistent, quality food for our valued customers. We are employee centered, family owned and strive for excellence in everything we do. **We are committed to making our community a better place for another 50 years and beyond.**

Part of our mission as a company is to better the community that we are a part of. We are proud to be located in the great state of Colorado, in the vibrant city of Denver and we understand that our actions as a company not only impact our immediate community, but also have an effect on the world we live in.

Our journey to be a more sustainable company is ongoing. It is something we can always work on, striving to be more efficient and lessen our impact on the environment.

Here are some updates on some our efficiency goals of last year:

By the end of 2021, we expected to reduce our energy usage by 1.6 million kilowatt hours annually.
UPDATE: Completed! We ended up reducing our usage by 1,600,598 million kilowatt. In order to achieve this goal. we have been replacing old air compressors, upgrading to LED lights and making revisions to our refrigeration controls to conserve energy.
Our other goal for 2021 was to reduce our water usage.
UPDATE: We continue to test water filtration systems at our facilities that will help us recycle the water used in our chill tanks. We have also committed to only using cleaning solutions in our food production areas that comply with the California Clean Water Act, which is more stringent than EPA requirements. These solutions will better preserve the water sources in our community.

Other fun facts.

We are excited to have purchased an additional building here in Denver! Our sustainability goals will influence that work too:

Rather than tearing down and building new, we are repurposing a 1970’s facility and turning it into a state-of-the-art food processing plant. Materials such as wood studs, metal, wiring and concrete are being recycled in the gutting process.
We will utilize LEED EB specs as a guide as we work on the building.
We will use all high-efficiency air compressors and boilers to reduce our impact on the grid and the earth.
Our refrigerators will only use ammonia/CO2, no freon refrigerants will be used.
At this new facility, we will continue to monitor the use of water filters in our cooling baths, balancing water reuse and food safety.
This building will also be a part of our continuous improvement work, we will work together with Xcel Energy to make upgrades and reduce our energy consumption.
As we modify this old (but new to us!) building, we are recycling materials that are being removed:
- 6.12 tons of wood recycled
- 7.8 tons of metal recycled
- 933 pounds of electronic ballasts recycled
- 381 pounds of copper recycled
- We have also reclaimed all of the freon from the previous occupant’s cooling units