Dominguez Hills, CA: Maruzen of America has installed Purfresh Cold Storage as a key component of the company’s refrigerated warehouse offerings. Purfresh’s intelligent atmosphere system, which incorporates ozone-based technology, naturally and effectively reduces decay, controls ripening, enhances food safety, and eliminates cross-contamination from one company’s produce to another.
“We’ve been in the business for over 35 years, and remain dedicated to providing the best possible service to our market,” said Hitoshi Kurosaki, warehouse manager of Maruzen. “Installing Purfresh Cold Storage, equipped with Intellipur, validates our commitment to helping our customers provide fresh produce of the highest quality possible to consumers around the world.”
Specifically engineered for refrigerated storage environments, the patented Purfresh Cold Storage technology ensures food safety and quality by combining a scalable, plug-and-play ozone-based system with Purfresh Intellipur online analytics—an information service that includes environmental sensing, web-based monitoring, alerting, data reporting, and analysis along with remote control and diagnostics. These technologies allow Maruzen to effectively regulate ripening and control decay while maintaining overall fruit quality.
Maruzen’s 150,000-square-foot refrigerated warehouse is divided into 16 different cold rooms, ranging from 3,500 to 22,000 square feet. These are primarily used for storing fruit and vegetables including citrus, kiwifruit, stone fruit, apples, grapes, and avocados for its worldwide customers. The facility is located in California to provide complete door-to-door service for international cargo. Maruzen was licensed as an ocean freight forwarder in 1975, and since then has been licensed as a custom house broker, ocean transportation intermediary, non-vessel operating common carrier, and truck broker.
Earlier in 2010, Purfresh announced research results demonstrating that controlled supplementation of ozone in cold storage conditions was able to kill and control the spread of foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella by more than 99.997 percent, Listeria monocytogenes, y more than 99.999 percent, and E coli O157:H7 by as much as 99.9 percent.