This all-new Mission Produce Laredo, TX facility is comprised of 262,000 sf for ripening and cold storage and second-floor mezzanine housing offices, administrative and conference areas. It holds the distinction of being one of the most sizeable avocado plants in North America, allowing the company to capitalize on the continued popularity of its signature product in the nation’s busiest land port.

Development of this innovative facility began with securing a site that allows Mission to expand its capabilities in the future. The building’s design permits the dry storage warehouse to convert to additional coolers and cooler docks. The office layout allows for expansion, and the refrigeration system is prepped to support future growth. This level of forethought enables the company to make any of these changes without disrupting existing product flow and output.

A M King’s internal design team worked with Mission to design layout and process flows, develop precise, flexible environmental specifications, and integrate custom processing and packaging equipment into a facility plan that would optimize efficiencies and allow for the anticipated future capacities. Functionality is a focus in all operational areas, such as storage, staging, ripening, packaging, shipping and receiving. All rooms are designed to facilitate company processes from receipt of the avocados from growers to vendor delivery.

Like any food facility that A M King designs and builds, sanitary design measures were put in place in this Mission Produce Laredo facility to protect product integrity. The design of this facility maintains the product in the cold chain, an environment which supports shelf-life extension until it reaches the end-user. In fact, Mission can control ripening of avocados to any of five stages of ripeness in one of its customized ripening rooms.

A M King designed Mission Produce’s first-ever hybrid facility to process both avocados and additional product lines with different temperature requirements. Our team collaborated with a specialized vendor to design and build a custom, flexible refrigeration system that has the ability to maintain thousands of pallets of product in a wide range of temperatures within 1°F of accuracy.

This state-of-the-art Mission Produce Laredo, TX facility increased the company’s North America capacity by more than 40 percent. Since its opening, Mission ramped up usage of the facility with the addition of mangos to the product portfolio and by servicing additional 3PL and other dry container storage partners.