As part of Chiquita Brands, the Fresh Express badge symbolizes premium-quality food and represents our company’s passionate about corporate social responsibility as much as Chiquita's iconic blue label. Chiquita and Fresh Express empower consumers to make healthy food choices by distributing fresh fruit, convenient healthy snacks and ready-to-eat salads.
At Chiquita Brands, sustainability is our responsibility. We are committed to reducing emissions, reducing plastic usage, and improving water conservation.
 | The best way to conserve the resources required to make the plastic in our packaging is simply to use less of it.
Fresh Express uses an innovative paper-plastic bag for a new line of salads. This packaging uses less plastic compared to our standard salad bag. As part of our ongoing commitment of plastic reduction, work is continuing in the development of more sustainable materials used by the company to make important contributions towards our sustainability goal. |
 | For every 100-gallons of fuel conserved, Fresh Express keeps more than 1 ton of greenhouse gases from entering our environments.
Through our voluntary partnership with the EPA's SmartWay initiative, we have improved fuel efficiency and reduced food miles (the number of miles required to deliver our products to your store) by 16 percent. These two initiatives of Fresh Express alone are equivalent to removing 200,000 cars from U.S. roads per year. |
 | The entire agricultural and manufacturing operations of Chiquita Brands are investigating water reduction and recycling opportunities. In North America, we’ve invested in dedicated teams and expertise to improve our sustainability practices regarding our Fresh Express Salads:
Fresh Express is one of the nation’s packaged salad suppliers developing and leading standards for high-density planting practices. Although technically challenging, the industry has adopted this practice, since it has proven to increase yields, reduce growing costs and make more efficient use of land and water. Grower Ag-vantage Through Irrigation and Nutrient Management (G.A.I.N.)™ (Pilot Program)
For the past 3 years, our researchers have also been working closely with growers, the University of California Cooperative Extension, and the California Regional Water Board to develop a proprietary precision farming method. G.A.I.N. Management™ utilizes evapotranspiration technology to reduce water and nitrogen use. To date, the G.A.I.N. Management™ grower educational information program has reduced both water and nitrogen usage by as much as 50 percent in full commercial plantings. Ongoing trial work has shown that precision irrigation based on soil moisture measurements, in combination with new technology to monitor nitrogen levels in the soil, has the potential to provide many social, environmental and economic benefits. |
But Corporate Responsibility goes beyond sustainability; it is also about social responsibility. We are proud to support United Fresh in an effort to place a salad bar in every school, and have cultivated an industry leading Preventative Food Safety Program.
These examples are a mere snapshot of the collaboration, energy and imagination that Chiquita and Fresh Express use to turn each challenge faced into an opportunity to invest in a sustainable future. To learn more about what we are doing company-wide, click here.