Toyota Forklifts & Calavo
Claudio Madrid: Calavo, we’re an avocado distributor. We’re outside of Dallas. This facility is 149,000 square feet. That includes ripe room, packing room, bagging machines. We do about 210 loads here on the average month. You know, when we do have big events like the Super Bowl, that will jump up to about 350.
Randy White: Shoppa’s is a dealer for Toyota Material Handling. I’m here to basically help them move their avocados. It’s almost like avocados are their own food group here in Texas.
Claudio Madrid: They came and saw what we needed and was able to spec out a forklift to our needs, so we don’t have to interchange forklifts for certain areas of our warehouse. In our warehouse you go anywhere from two to four height.
Randy White: They also have drive-in rack, and so we were able to have a forklift made that fits exactly in their drive-in rack, that has a lowered height, that goes in and out of their dock area, but yet it reaches the top almost 20 feet in the air.
Claudio Madrid: They made it easier for us to go in there and spec out the forklifts and be able to use every single one in every area of our facility.
Randy White: So is this gonna be full here in about a month?
Claudio Madrid: Yeah, right by Cinco de Mayo.
Randy White: Their ripening rooms require things to be done in a timely manner, so if they have a piece of equipment that’s down, we’ve gotta have a technician here very quickly to get that piece of equipment back up and running.
Claudio Madrid: They’ll come and repair it and, if they can’t, they’ll give us a rental and be able to stay onboard with all our operations here.
I have worked with other lifts. I mean, I’ve been in this industry since I was 20 years old, and, for me, Toyota’s been better, less problematic, and we don’t have much issues, you know, which is very important. You can’t have issues and do your daily operations.
Randy White: As we come up with solutions for customers, it’s really just simplifying their processes, and it makes things easier and also generally finds a cost savings as well.
Claudio Madrid: At the end of the day, that avocado’s gonna be on somebody’s table, and that’s why I think it’s very important to take it serious.
We’re loading trucks quicker, we’re receiving ’em quicker, we’re doing our production in our production area a lot smoother, and there’s basically no downtime.