Fresh & Ready Foods

Fresh & Ready Foods (legal entity Fresh & Ready Foods LLC, formerly Lehman Foods) is a San Fernando, CA manufacturer and distributor of ready-to-eat (RTE) grab-and-go foods — sandwiches, salads, wraps, burritos, entrees, snack trays and box lunches — founded around 1990 and operating for 25+ years; it sells to hospitals, universities, hotels, film/production caterers, convention centers, airlines, convenience stores and vending operators across the West Coast, Southwest and Midwest, and also offers co-packing and private-label production. It runs SQF/FDA/USDA-inspected kitchens and historically employed roughly 275 workers across San Fernando, San Diego and Las Vegas sites; the business is operated under Compass Group USA, which received the FDA warning letter for the facility. Production is heavily manual ('production crew' assembling product by hand). The company is currently under significant food-safety stress: a multistate Listeria monocytogenes outbreak (10 hospitalized, 1 death) was linked to its San Fernando plant, triggering a large May 2025 voluntary recall and a September 2025 FDA warning letter citing inadequate sanitation controls; it also closed its Dallas facility (65 layoffs) in 2025. This contamination history is the dominant strategic context — automating hand-contact food assembly is directly relevant to reducing human-borne contamination risk.