SIDEBAR: Grader Than Ever

A day in the life of a tomato

Tomatoes are the latest fruit to receive the technology treatment, with a system being installed that will individually label each tomato, each tray, each box, each pallet with a barcode.

Eric and Frances Testa are in partnership with Moraitis to supply hydroponically-grown tomatoes. Their business, Testarossa, is based in Tatura, Victoria and until now has been using manual, paper-based information systems. However, when the business needed a new fruit grader, it also decided to add barcoded information systems that would improve accountability and traceability.

Managing director Eric Testa believes moving to barcodes will significantly speed up processing and expects the system, which will cost just under $200,000 including the new grader, to pay for itself within two years. Besides speeding up the actual process of packing, the system will also provide valuable information both to him about running Testarossa (such as which packers are most efficient) and to Moraitis about the tomatoes as they enter the supply chain. In Victoria, Testarossa ships its tomatoes directly to the retailers, while tomatoes are shipped in NSW via Moraitis.

Testa says the new system promises much better traceability, for example allowing himself and Moraitis to know right down to individual shop level when trays of tomatoes were shipped. The only information that is not currently held on the tray bar- code is the purchase order number, although that is on the bar- code put on the pallets.

At the moment packing and accounting for tomatoes is a manual and quite labour-intensive operation. As each tomato comes in from the 18 growers supplying Testa each piece of fruit is graded and packed into 10 kilo boxes. The boxes are then weighed and packed into trays according to size with a sticker fixed to each tomato and a hand-written packing sheet produced for every grower.

The new barcoding system, which is being installed along with a new fruit grader, will replace the need to fill out forms manually and also provide a much better audit trail, allowing traceability of each piece of fruit.

Barcodes on the fruit and trays will identify the grower and the packer, and a bar-code reader on the grader will mean there is no longer any need to physically count each tray and manually record the details. If the tomatoes are being sent to NSW from Victoria, once they arrive at the Moraitis yards the forklift drivers will be able to scan pallet barcodes, confirm the weight of the load, and then upload that information directly from a tablet PC on the forklift that is connected wirelessly to Moraitis's ERP system.