International Immigrant Achievement Award
Cut Fruit buys fresh produce from farmers in California, Texas, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, and other parts of the world. The company’s scientists—Baxter and one other employee—determine the kind of packaging required to keep different types of cut produce fresh and provide the specifications to a packaging company. Cut Fruit then sells these cut fruits and vegetables to retailers such as Core-Mark, Kiwk Trip, Holiday, as well as to distributors, including H. Brooks & Company, US Foods, Upper Lakes Foods, Indianhead Food Distribution, Reinhart Foodservice to name a few, that deliver them to restaurants and grocery stores. The company serves customers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North and South Dakota, and Nebraska.
Employees go to work - in their own gardens
Lawford Baxter helps his employees grow - literally.
The owner of Inver Grove Heights fruit and vegetable supplier Cut Fruit Express is in the fifth year of offering some of his business property for employee gardens.
Baxter tills about two acres of land each fall and spring for the plots.
"If you like to grow things and you live in an apartment, you can't exactly grow anything," he said.
About Lawford
Cut Fresh Express is committed to continuing to produce the best possible product while maintaining high standards to improve sustainability in our workplace and our community.
Project Sweetie Pie
Project Sweetie Pie (PSP) encourages youngsters to literally get their hands dirty by learning how to plant gardens and grow food, in the process acquainting them with exercise out in the fresh air as well in entrepreneurship. They get a practical, very useful lesson in living off the land. “We want young people to become food producers.”
“We are creating a food corridor, an industry cluster. Glen Ford, Lawford Baxter, Collie Graddick, Catherine Fleming are just a few of the food entrepreneurs who are food champions in our community.
