Quality and Food Safety at Harvest Sensations
Specialty produce is bought on trust. A buyer accepting a pallet of mangoes or a case of baby lettuce is trusting that someone checked the farm, the harvest crew, the packhouse, the cold chain and the paperwork long before that pallet reached the dock. Our job is to be that someone, and to be able to show the documentation when you ask for it.
Harvest Sensations is a grower-direct importer. We buy from an established grower network spanning the United States, Mexico, Central America and South America, consolidate at our own facilities in Miami, Florida and Los Angeles, California, and ship to restaurants, retailers and foodservice distributors nationwide. Because we buy at origin rather than through intermediaries, the chain between the field and your kitchen is short enough to actually verify.
Our Certifications
Harvest Sensations holds GLOBALG.A.P., PrimusGFS and CCOF Organic certification. Each one covers a different part of the chain, and together they cover it end to end — the farm, the handling and the organic claim.
GLOBALG.A.P.
GLOBALG.A.P. is the internationally recognized standard for Good Agricultural Practices at the farm level. Certification is granted after audit by an accredited third-party certification body, and it covers food safety and traceability at the point of production, environmental management, and worker health and safety.
What it means for a buyer: the practices behind the product were verified where the product was grown, not asserted afterward on a spec sheet. GLOBALG.A.P. is also the standard most European and multinational retail programs expect, so it travels well if your business has customers outside the United States.
PrimusGFS
PrimusGFS is a food safety certification scheme benchmarked against the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) and built specifically for the fresh produce supply chain. Its scope runs across farms, harvest crews, packinghouses, cold storage and distribution operations, and its audit covers the food safety management system, Good Agricultural Practices, Good Manufacturing Practices and HACCP-based hazard analysis.
What it means for a buyer: GFSI benchmarking is the reason most major retail and foodservice programs accept a PrimusGFS certificate without requiring their own separate audit. If your supplier approval process asks for a GFSI-recognized scheme, this is the document that satisfies it.
CCOF Certified Organic
CCOF is a USDA-accredited organic certifying agent. CCOF certification means the certified operation is inspected annually and complies with the USDA National Organic Program regulations, including the requirement for an unbroken audit trail from the certified source through to the product you receive.
What it means for a buyer: an organic claim is only as good as the certificate behind it, and organic integrity is broken by handling as easily as by growing — a certified organic item that passes through an uncertified handler stops being sellable as organic. Certification on the handling side is what lets an organic program hold up under a retail audit.
Certificates are re-issued on their own audit cycles. If your supplier approval file needs current copies, ask our sales team and we will send the versions in force for the item and origin you are buying.
Sourcing: Why Grower-Direct Matters for Safety
Traceability is easy to promise and hard to deliver once a product has changed hands three times. Every additional broker between the farm and the distributor is another point where lot identity gets lost, another cold chain handoff nobody witnessed, and another party whose audit status you are taking on faith.
We source directly from growers, which keeps the chain short by design. Our buyers work the same regions season after season and know the operations personally rather than through a paper trail. That relationship is what makes an honest availability call possible — the ability to say a lane is tight or a lot is not up to spec before it ships, instead of after you have accepted it.
The Cold Chain, From Field to Your Dock
Most quality loss in specialty produce is not caused by bad product. It is caused by temperature, and it is usually invisible on arrival — chilling injury on peppers, translucency in ginger, blackened basil leaf, pitting on French beans all appear days after the case was signed for.
That is why we receive, grade and cold-chain product through our own facilities rather than cross-docking it unseen. Different categories are held at the temperatures they actually want, not at one convenient number: berries near 32–34°F, most leafy items and roots at 34–38°F, beans and peas at 40–45°F, chilies and tropicals at 45–50°F, and basil above 50°F, where it does not blacken. Getting this right is the difference between a product that arrives with most of its shelf life intact and one that arrives already spent.
Conventional and Organic, Side by Side
We source and sell both conventional and organic fruits, herbs, vegetables and specialty items. Organic is not a separate business for us but a parallel one, run through the same grower relationships and the same facilities, with the segregation and documentation that organic certification requires.
For a retailer or foodservice operator, that means an organic set and a conventional set can be built from one supplier, on one order and one delivery, without managing two vendor relationships and two sets of paperwork.
Sustainability and Sourcing Responsibility
Our mission is to sustainably source and sell high quality, sensationally fresh conventional and organic fruits, herbs, vegetables and specialties from our local and global grower partners — effectively and efficiently, with customer service that makes the relationship worth having on both sides.
In practice that starts with the standards above. GLOBALG.A.P. is not only a food safety standard: it also covers environmental management and worker health and safety at the farm, which means the growers in our network are audited on how they treat their land and their people, not only on what they ship.
Ask Us for the Documentation
If you are building a supplier file, running a retail audit, or simply want to know exactly where an item came from and how it was handled, ask. Miami 305.591.8173, Los Angeles 213.895.6968, or use the contact page.
You can also browse our full product range, plan a season with the availability calendar, or read more about who we are.
