<<Rewind 2017: Valley Pack

In-depth

5 June

From the Valley to the World

The Hall family has lived in Mooroopna since the1860’s.

Taylor Hall is the third generation to work in the family run business, Valley Pack on the outskirts of this Goulburn Valley town.

His Grandfather, Ian, grew fruit to be sent to the cannery in Mooroopna which was a cooperative. From there it was processed and exported to the United Kingdom. SPC and Ardmona were the predominant canned fruit exporters.

“There is a difference between canned fruit and fresh fruit. Back then everybody grew fruit for cans and as the demand for that dropped, people slowly shifted to growing for the fresh fruit market. That in turn has driven the increase in the cold storage and logistics businesses.

“Most of the larger growers became cold storage operators by necessity and then, as the product shifted away from canned fruit to fresh fruit, the demand for cold storage grew to the point where every piece of fruit grown in the Goulburn Valley needs to go into a cool store.”

**Taylor Hall with one of the 'Staff Cars'**

Valley Pack is a third-party cold storage provider for fruit in the Goulburn Valley and also provide logistics and import/export operations for other fruit growers.

“Dad, Mark, came into the business around 1981. At the time Valley Pack was a fruit exporting company and fruit growing business. At the end of the 1980s they basically sold all the orchards but one. So the business now is purely cold storage, with transport to support that with import/export trucks. They are the areas that I look after with Dad as GM.”

Valley Pack employ 33 full-time staff – all locals. Product comes into the cool store, through a multitude of subcontractors, used to load product from all over southern Australia.

“We pick up the product in those areas from fruit exporters and growers. It comes into the cold storage facility where it’s stored, cooled to go through the quarantine process and export documentation is completed. We then load the consignments to order and transport them to the wharf for export.”

Valley Pack have 20 cool rooms with another eight in the pipeline. Each cool room holds around 5 to 600 tonnes of product when full. In a typical day in-season they bring in between 300 - 600 tonnes. Another part of the business is purely cold storage where long-term cold storage services are provided to store product for up to 12 months after picking - after which it’s ‘fresh from the supermarket shelf to you’. On peak weeks the company moves 10% of all refrigerated cargo that comes out of the Port of Melbourne, averaging 6% over a year.

“We’ll be building another cold storage facility specifically for import-export. It will be the biggest freezer-capable, import-export, single block cool store outside of the city. It will hold around 6,000 tonnes of product and will be able to process around 400 tonnes in and out each day and segregate our long-term storage.”

The company also supply third-party container logistics for any exporting company in the Goulburn Valley including meat, some dairy products and general import-export for local retail businesses.

“We’ve actually come from using rail to move our products, to a point where in 2011 we chose to shift to our own trucks and use the road model. It’s probably one of the key decisions that has allowed the business to increase in size. We have 10 trucks one of which is a yard truck, that’s an International. All but one of the other nine are Kenworth.”

“Fruit is always a ‘just-in-time’ product. If you land the product in a terminal on the last receiving date, that product has an extra week of shelf life when it reaches China. Some product at Valley Pack is landed at the wharf 18 to 20 hours after it is picked in Mildura. The key to that is having good equipment, well-maintained forklifts and new equipment in the cool store. The cool store itself needs to be reliable and obviously the trucks need to be just as reliable. That’s why it’s been a recent business decision to only purchase Kenworth. It is, in my opinion the best product on the market.”

“We purchase our container skulls from Barker out of Woodend. Their equipment in our opinion is also the best on the market with great after sales support. We also use BPW axles exclusively, simply because of their reliability.

“One of the most important things as a family and as a small local corporate entity is to spend every dollar we can in our community. Our maintenance is all undertaken in Shepparton and Mooroopna, all our staff live locally and every cost that we can source locally we do.”

“We feel that here at Valley Pack are some of the best paid trucking jobs going around. I don’t know too many others getting paid $100,000 pa plus superannuation - and they get to go home each night. Every one of those dollars is in our community and our town. It’s very important.

“We worked out that each truck basically puts $4000 per week back into the community. The truck puts every one of those dollars through wages through repairs and maintenance, everything spent on the trucks, other than fuel and registration ends up in our town.

“We recognise our responsibility to the local community. Without them we would cease to exist. This is where we live. We look after them, they look after us.”