BROOKLINE, NH - For many of us, joining this industry has been a call to action—to offer consumers the best quality of life by providing the freshest ingredients. This is true of DECCO, a leader in the sanitation side of business that aims to keep fruits and vegetables safe.

For New Business Sales Manager Jesse Miceli and Sales and Business Development Manager Tim Madden with DECCO this call to action is second nature. They join me to talk about the company’s vision and the process that has taken shape ever since.

“We jumped in on sanitation and found different chemicals and technologies that hadn’t been used in food safety before,” Jesse continues. “We realized that they were a match made in heaven. Some came from the medical field; others came from different areas of agriculture. When we brought them together in the pack house, we realized we had a much safer approach because we realized we weren’t relying on technologies 20 or 30 years old.”

When it comes to sanitation, companies have a need to be on their A game, and this is a stress that DECCO wants to alleviate, if only for the time it takes to go through the cleaning process. The post-harvest-focused company provides a plethora of options to meet customers’ and their businesses' needs.

"The draw for customers, that we’ve found, is the need for better sanitation. My goal with every customer is that their food safety guy sleeps a little better every night. They have a lot to worry about, so we just want to give them an extra safeguard,” Jesse shares. “We are a one-stop shop. They can get their waxes, fungicides, aerosols, on-food contact sanitation, and more. Beyond that, we usually can cut their sanitation and cleaning time in half and save the customer money. So, our first goal is to give the customer safer and cleaner environment, and our second goal is to do it cheaper.”

One of the company’s biggest sellers is its aerosol service, a dry sanitation process, but DECCO has made major moves over the course of its running.

“DECCO has really changed in the last one year, let alone the last five years in the north west. The company started expanding with the purchase of a Yakima based wax manufacturer in 2008. That started the transition that blossomed in a lot of other things. Our specialty is a host of post-harvest fungicides for the produce industry— liquid forms for the apple, pear and cherry industries for storage or use on the packing line. We also have an aerosol technology that is very unique. It is a dry application of fungicides to the product in the cold-storage rooms,” Tim explains. “The produce can be stored throughout the season. We apply through the door, it encapsulates the entire room and treats product. That is our specialty in the North West—the aerosol technology that we promote.”

While competitors utilize a wet application, the company plans to stay cutting-edge with its aerosol technique. At the end of the day, DECCO’s efforts all boil down to customers’ cost and labor, Tim tells me.

“Growers are trying to figure out how to grow more product with less labor and cost all the time. That is one of the benefits of our product,” Tim says. “We can apply product faster and more efficiently than our competition. We can go out and treat any size of a storage room in one application, which saves on man hours for our clients. The clients only have to show up, make sure we are doing our job, and let us apply our products over the course of time. We’re very efficient.”

To boost its impact on the industry, the company offers four types of fungicides and is always looking for that fifth and sixth, Tim laughs. DECCO also provides packinghouse support and makes available controllers that can test the water used in packinghouses to see if the proper pH balances are in place. It also manufactures its own wax for the apple, citrus, and other industries that it assists. What really has the company moving full speed ahead, though, is its new facility in Wenatchee, Washington, that opened in April, where DECCO has a state-of-the-art lab that can test and treat compounds, office space for staff, and a warehouse for storage of products and treatment trailers.

With so much growth in the works, DECCO works closely with customers to find what works for them and to make sanitation practices available that might not have been known for another 10 years.

Always ahead of the curve, DECCO pushes forward and looks forward for more ways to better our industry, and that is something I applaud with gratitude.

DECCO