Facilities

Nowhere is A.V. Thomas Produce’s growth and innovation seen more clearly than in our facilities.

In the beginning, we had one small packing shed in downtown Livingston – a building we still own today. It had one packing line, no loading dock and little storage space. Our sweet potatoes and yams were cleaned with brushes and packed in small crates. At our busiest, we could only load a few trucks a day.

In 1979, we built our first warehouse and then another in 1984.

The big expansion came in 1988; just 11 years after Manuel E. Vieira bought the company. To keep up with increased sales and sales trends, he built a brand-new 65,000-square-foot packing shed, which we continue to expand and update to this day.

Innovation at Work

We pride ourselves on the top notch quality product we produce, as well as how best we can serve our customers. This upgrade is a big part of the future of A.V. Thomas Produce! The only automated sweet potato packing line on the west coast and the only one of its kind in the United States. Always growing, evolving and leading the industry. #avthomasproduce #sweetpotatoes

Sustainability

We at A.V. Thomas Produce are devoted to bringing our production to the future. Which means going green, sustainability throughout our facilities. We have taken the first and largest steps in this direction by adding solar power to help offset the power consumption. New times require new innovations and that's exactly what we are geared to do. #solarpower #goinggreen

This spirit of innovation can be seen today in our individually wrapped microwavable sweet potatoes and ready-to-serve tray packs of baby sweet potatoes – new products bringing sweet potatoes to new customers and new markets.

A.V. Thomas Produce is now the largest sweet potato and yam producer in California; with 32 separate buildings, seven different packing lines, over 600,000 square feet of warehouse space, six loading docks and up to 800 employees depending on the season. We have an on-site scale and can load and ship 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. On a busy day we can load over 100 truckloads of sweet potatoes. But it’s not just about getting bigger. It’s also about doing things better.

A.V. Thomas Produce was the first company to hand-sort sweet potatoes in the field as they were being harvested, an innovation that makes each of our packing lines faster and more efficient. We were also the first to make sweet potatoes available year-round for our customers.

When the industry began using tubs of water to clean the potatoes, we were among the first to install larger, deeper tubs. Rather than dump the potatoes into the tubs from above – letting them bang and bruise against each other, we lower our harvest bins into the water, so each sweet potato is protected and buffered as it floats to the surface.