Valencia lemon processing plant makes Chick-fil-A's lemonade
Lemons from Los Angeles County make up the liquid gold that pours out of Chick-fil-A restaurants nationwide anytime a lemonade is ordered.
At some of the fast-food restaurants, employees were juicing up to 300 pounds of lemons a day. It is a job that employee Dana Shifflett said nobody wanted.
"It was a lot of work. It was very tedious," Shifflett said. "Very messy, sticky, pulp everywhere in the sink, on the counters, so yeah, what we're doing now is much, much easier."
Now, Chick-fil-A restaurants nationwide get already-squeezed lemon juice from Bay Center Foods in Valencia. The company opened the highly automated facility a few years ago, focusing on quality, freshness and green practices -- as no part of the squeezed lemons make it to a landfill.
Kurt Cahill with Bay Center Foods said California is the largest lemon producer in the nation with all the lemons coming from within a one to two-hour drive from the plant. After squeezing the juice from the fruit, he said everything that's left gets used, from peel to pulp.
"We actually rough up the outside of the lemon, and we extract the oil, and then the oil is purified," Cahill said.
The oil is sold to perfume manufacturers and flavor houses and the rest of the lemon peel is turned into animal feed.
"So now instead of it going to landfill, it is going to feed the cattle, which in the state of California, there is a lot of cattle and a lot of pigs to feed."
Researchers are experimenting with other applications for food waste.
"We took the lemon peel and dried it into a powder, ground into a powder, and we made a compostable bioplastic out of it," Cahill said.
Some day, Chick-fil-A may serve compostable forks, knives and spoons made from lemon peels. In the meantime, they will keep serving fresh California lemonade.
