Let’s all keep safe and healthy

Chelan Fresh is a family of growers, packers and marketers, with families of our own at home. We know that our customers and consumers rely on us to deliver wholesome, safe fruits to satisfy and sustain America’s tables.

Your trust is essential to us, and we are working hard to keep that trust at this critical time.

Because we supply food, most members of the Chelan Fresh family of companies have been declared to be essential workers during this pandemic. We report to work every day to help keep our nation’s food supply chain flowing – from our orchards, our packinghouses and our company offices, to the trucks that deliver our goods coast to coast. To Team Chelan Fresh, thank you for your dedication!

COVID-19 is transmitted person-to-person, so our priority is to protect our co-workers, families and communities from it spreading. Some of our efforts include:

  • Adapting our worker hygiene and health practices: While we have extensive worker health and hygiene practices in place in normal times, we’ve strengthened them for these times. We are grateful to our team members for their 24/7 cooperation, accepting limits on how they work and live around the clock. 
  • Coordination: We closely coordinate with and/or monitor local, state and federal health agencies to ensure we are current on their recommendations and requirements.
  • Equipment and training: Team members are provided PPE and instructed on social distancing, frequent hand washing/sanitizing, local options for testing, symptoms to watch for, and how to isolate if they need to. We communicate with them frequently, issuing reminders and updates. 
  • Group pods: Our guest workers have been organized into small groups to work and live. They travel, work, eat, reside and recreate together in approved housing. During work hours, their interaction with others outside their group is limited. We ask employees to voluntarily social distance and practice the same preventive measures during non-work hours too.
  • Isolation and monitoring: Should a worker show symptoms, employees are instructed to isolate at home and be monitored by their usual medical providers; guest workers are isolated in quarantine housing and monitored by health professionals. We will then activate special response plans including notifying exposed co-workers and public health officials. 
  • Lockdown and waiting periods: Should a production area be exposed to an infected worker, we lock that area down, and after a safe waiting period we clean and sanitize that area thoroughly before putting it back online. 
  • Family support: We are a family-friendly business that allows employees who can effectively work from home to do so while tending to children or elderly parents during this pandemic.
  • Travel, meeting and visitor limits: We have stopped tours and are otherwise limiting access to our facilities to essential persons only. We are relying on Zoom and other virtual gathering technology, just like everyone else.
  • Continuous attention to food safety: While this virus is not foodborne, we continually seek to improve our systems. To us, food safety is a journey, not a destination. So, we have revisited all of our food safety steps to ensure they reflect the latest science. This includes how we clean and sanitize equipment, starting with the bins we place fruit in after it is picked, continuing through our packing lines and finished goods storerooms, to our truck loading docks.
  • Communication and transparency: We are committed to keeping our customers, consumers, workers and communities informed. Again, you are essential to us.

This is just a summary of some of our efforts. If you have any questions please click here and send us an email.