After 50 years in business and three generations of the family line working in it, the Hall family and their company, Valley Pack Cold Storage, have a bit to celebrate.
“A family business, my father worked the business, his father, a real family show, to where we are today ... 45 other staff, we move close to 14,000 TEU, 20-foot container equivalent, into the Port of Melbourne each year,” operations manager Taylor Hall said.
“We’re one of the significant, say the larger horticultural storage and transport facilities in Australia. There’s a core group of four or five of us and we’re one of them.”
The Hall family have owned and worked their Mooroopna site since the turn of the 20th century.
Born in Ardmona in 1931, Ian Hall began grew pears on the existing orchard in the 1950s, supplying the Ardmona fruit canning facility.
Ian and his wife, Jeanette, were helped by the return of eldest son Mark to make the move into fruit export and cold storage, becoming one of the largest suppliers of apricots for canning in Australia by the 1980s.
Taylor Hall, the grandson of Ian and son of Mark, joined the fray in 2011, expanding the family business into transport and logistics, including packing and cold storage.
They started with one truck, but the company now boasts more than 30. The growth in that aspect of the business coinciding with a gradual withdrawal from the growing side, with the last of the home orchard, consisting of 100-year-old Williams pear trees, recently pushed out.
“That’s how Valley Pack is where it is today, from having that expertise from exporting pears through providing the same service with oranges and table grapes, which are probably the main horticultural exports from Australia today,” Taylor said.
From a drive to pack and sell their own fruit, the family have developed an expertise in the packing and cold storage field that has become core business, extending to growers beyond the Goulburn Valley.
“So this region only forms a very small part of the horticultural export that Valley Pack handle today,” Taylor said.
“The horticulture has shifted probably more to a warmer climate, so Mildura and Robinvale and the South Australian Riverland are the significant producers now, and that’s where our work comes from.”