The odds are if you buy a pizza or even salsa, the peppers used were processed by Eckert.

The Escalon-based firm is the United States’ largest supplier of individually quick frozen bell peppers.

They are also a major supplier of roasted peppers, jalapenos, poblanos, and cabbage.

They have three processing plants and cold storage facilities including in Escalon, Mexico, and Manteca on Moffat Boulevard bordering the Manteca High football stadium.

On Tuesday, the Manteca City Council is expected to renew an agreement with Eckert through 2028 to handle the wastewater that is heavily laden with nitrates after water is used wash the bell peppers.

The cost of the process for Eckert is $203,378 for 2026.

Eckert, that employs more than 100 people, was in danger of closing down in 2000.

That is when high nitrate levels in wastewater being treated at the municipal treatment plant caused the city to go out of compliance with state water quality treatment standards

To comply with the state order and to protect Manteca jobs, developers approached the city with a solution.

The housing boom was underway and sewer capacity was running out at the treatment plant.

So developers — working in conjunction with city staff —  hatched a plan to have the capacity used by Eckert’s shifted to residential uses in exchange for developers fronting the $1.2 million to build a purple pipeline from the Moffat processing facility to the treatment plant plus give another $2.3 million in bonus bucks – development agreement fees paid in exchange for sewer allocation certainty.

The wastewater is basically harmless for land disposal, would no longer flow into the treatment plant. Instead, it would be applied to land the city leased to a farmer to grow corn for silage. The high nitrate content of the water is ideal to grow healthy corn.

The purple pipe project took Eckert’s water that was used to clean bell peppers for bell peppers and applied it to land at the treatment plant. In doing so, it freed  up plant capacity to accommodate an additional 1,853 single family homes.

In 2009, issues arose with the direct land disposal of the Eckert wastewater

The city created what has been dubbed “the Industrial Sewer System.”

 The Industrial Sewer System conveys Eckert’s industrial wastewater around the City’s sanitary sewer collection system and the City’s Wastewater Quality Control Facility (into a lined pond to be aerated then discharged to city owned farmland adjacent to the plant.

The annual sewer charge paid by Eckert covers the cost of maintaining and operating the Industrial Sewer System.

If Eckert ever cease operations, the purple pipe put in place could be used to handle reverse flows from the plant to deliver treated wastewater suitable for landscape irrigation.

The pipeline runs along Moffat, along the 120 Bypass, and then north into the treatment plant.

The City Council meets Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the Civic Center, 1001 W. Center St.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com