The Clear Springs Corporation owns 18,000 acres of rolling land between Bartow, Winter Haven and Lakeland. Blueberries are figuring heavily in its plans for that land. I took a tour of the company’s brand new packing plant on Monday. The 100,000 square-foot building is a refurbished citrus packing plant located on Spirit Lake Road, very near the intersection with State Road 17 and the Bartow Municipal Airport. It’s been open just a month, but Clear Springs claims it’s already processing about 25 percent of Florida’s blueberry crop, which is harvested roughly between March and June.

Blueberry demand is skyrocketing, the company says. Clear Springs hopes to eventually use the processing center to process berries grown in other parts of the world at different times of the year. And, the company is in process of creating a thousand-acre blueberry farm just down the road from the center. A farm that size would be “by a wide margin,” the largest single blueberry farm in the country, said Dorn Wenninger, the vice president with Clear Springs in charge of the packing plant.

Here you see specially built blueberry boxes called “lugs.” This is how berries are brought to the plant. Each pallet of lugs is marked with a barcoded sticker that allows Clear Springs to note electronically exactly which farm each batch of berries came from. Wenninger harped on this computerized tracking system, noting the recent food contamination scandals, particularly California spinach problem. The packing center is currently handling berries from about 30 different farms, Wenninger said.

In a another food safety measure, there is an “air lock” between the outside loading docks and the processing system inside the plant, where employees run the fruit through conveyor systems. Here you’re looking into the plant floor from the air lock.

About 45 men and women are working here during the seasonal rush. They are not Clear Springs employees, but experienced packers with a citrus company, which contracts with Clear Springs to provide labor. Wenninger said typical wages start at about $8per hour for the workers. The plant has a full-time, year-round Clear Springs staff of about 15. It is cool on the processing floor, literally. The air is kept at about 60 degrees for the health of the fruit.

Once the fruit is packaged, it is super-cooled prior to shipping to a nippy 34 degrees. That’s the temperature that best preserves the fruit, Wenninger said. The cooling is accomplished using these heavy duty cold machines, which essentially suck cold air through the berry pallets, ensuring that each berry is cooled. The plant also has atmospheric storage units that adjust the oxygen and nitrogen in the air, making longer-term storage of the fruit possible. However, for now, most of the fruit is leaving the facility for shipping within hours of its packaging.

Hee’s a row of packaged pallets, along with an up close shot of the small containers that hold the berries. Wenninger said the packing plant is shipping berries all over the world, including to Japan.

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