How to reduce costs in fresh produce wholesale

The biggest controllable costs in produce wholesale are order handling, waste, labelling errors and delivery. All four respond to automation.

Farmsoft · Updated 25 October 2026 · 2 min read

How to reduce costs in fresh produce wholesale

Key points

Online ordering cuts order-handling cost by up to about 95 %.
Customers maintain their own orders and details.
Automatic labels remove re-labelling and rejections.
Energy, inputs and waste are both cost and carbon.

Order handling

Phone, text and email orders cost staff time and create errors. Online ordering lets customers place and change orders within your cut-off rules and maintain their own details; Producepak customers estimate order-handling cost reductions of about 95 %.

Waste

Real-time stock and FIFO picking reduce product that ages out. Fewer errors mean fewer credits and returns.

How to reduce costs in fresh produce wholesale – illustration 1

Producepak

Fresh produce inventory, QC, traceability, packing and shipping in one app.

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Labels

Labels generated automatically for each customer and product remove manual preparation and the cost of rejections.

Energy, inputs and carbon

Rabobank research on food and beverage value chains shows that the largest sources of carbon – energy, raw inputs, transport and waste – are also major costs. Efficiency gains in those areas reduce both, and often reduce exposure to price volatility.