Fresh produce quality control has never been easier for packer, processors and wholesalers of fruit & vegetable, seafood, poultry, meats, flowers, herbs, seeds, hope and other foods that need fresh produce quality control.
Flexible fresh produce quality control software can be used to reduce the incorrect categorization of fresh produce as waste, leading to higher pack shed profits and more consistent quality, with improved customer satisfaction. FarmSoft manages fresh produce businesses from end to end, providing a comprehensive fresh produce business management solution.
Reduce fresh produce losses by Quality Analysis analysis of fresh produce that has been discarded as “waste” to ensure waste product is within the specification of waste.
Quality control for fresh produce
Quality control app for fresh produce
Manage customer complaints for fresh produce: track comments, customer feedback, photos, and resolutions provided when a complaint is made. Trace complaints back to the supplier or your own block/crop/patch/batch.
Supplier quality management: monitor and manage quality from each supplier, receive supplier quality alerts, track quality issues back to suppliers batches, plots, and blocks.
Configure unlimited quality control programs, including specific programs for produce, variety, customer, or finished product. Flexibly add your own fields and options to tests as required.
Quality control tests can be for almost anything, such as testing incoming produce, outgoing produce, pre pack, pre graded produce, factory cleanliness test, employee performance, task quality control etc. You can define the subject (thing) that you are testing as virtually anything
Each quality control test can be a pass/fail, or value range style test (ie: where results must be within the range of two numbers, or above or below a number), weighted score, or percent of sample
Automatically send quality control alerts to selected employees if a specific test fails or passes (a copy of the entire test results are sent with the email in a PDF)
Attach photos to the test (via your tablet, smartphone, or PC) and to the criteria for instruction
Quality tests can give users suggested “corrective actions” when there is a fresh produce quality failure.
Manually put produce on hold for further inspection
Each quality control program can be configured to have unlimited categories, each category can have unlimited tests (criteria)
Set the number of tests to make the entire test program fail
Set individual fresh produce quality tests to make an entire test program fail
Set the number of tests in a Category to make the entire test program fail
Configure unlimited “classes” and “features” that can be assigned to inventory
Users can click on images for close ups and open documents attached to the test criteria, this is used to ensure quality officers always have access to the correct documentation for their work.
Quality control for a rapidly changing fresh produce retail landscape
Farmsoft has over 19 years experience supporting and promoting the fresh produce industry, working with the entire value chain, from seed producers, grower to consumer, providing leadership on pan-produce issues. One of the key challenges in the industry has been in providing affordable solutions that easily interconnect growers to manufacturers and manufacturers to grocers so that a product can be easily tracked throughout the entire supply chain.
Quality control for fresh produce
Fresh produce quality control (fruit & vegetable)
FarmSoft combines all fresh produce traceability processes into one business management solution, ensuring that the correct quality control, compliance, and operational tasks are performed at the correct time. This guarantees higher quality compliance and lower waste and non conformity issues.
Quality control – fruit quality control
Comprehensive and flexible quality control can be configured to cater for QMS, international standards, internal, and customer QC specifications. Quality control tests can use score weighting, value ranges, pass / fail, percentage of count/weight, quantity of criteria fail, quantity of category fail, quantity of all category fails, and more. Quality tests are standardized and ensure consistent testing and product quality. Quality tests can be performed on any ‘subject’ as defined by your configuration, such as raw produce, finished produce, incoming pallets, outgoing pallets, shipping container, and more. Quality alerts can be automatically sent to quality managers when specific tests fail or conditions are met. Perform quality control on a tablet, smartphone, PC or Mac.
Fresh produce inventory management – fruit quality control
From the deliver of fresh produce, storage, purchase orders for fresh produce, delivery receipts for fresh produce from external farms, inventory traceability, FIFO management, expiring inventory management, inventory ripening, mobile inventory management, inventory labeling, inventory stock takes, inventory reporting, pallet control and pallet management – FarmSoft has you covered!
Perform fresh produce recall up and down the supply chain – fruit quality control
FarmSoft allows recalls based on invoice, purchase order, customer reference, delivery date, delivery docket, sales order, and more. No more recording redundant data on multiple logs or spreadsheet. Instant recall makes audits easy and fast and reduces quality and standard compliance costs. You can also record multiple levels of traceability data, for example, your suppliers supplier can be documented, along with batch and lot codes for their produce. This data can make comprehensive product recalls rapid and instant. Multi-level traceability is not support by many competitor fresh produce solutions.
Cascading traceability – fresh produce quality control
fresh produce quality system
QMS and quality control for fruit and vegetable, processing, food manufacturing
Is a system whereby fresh produce is processed in a a batch, and may in turn be used in other batches, and those batches may in turn be used in additional batches and so on. This is a common practice when processing fresh produce where the harvest needs to be mixed together, is graded or sorted, then packed with other produce at a later time. This practice is also common in food processing and value adding processes, where an input to one batch may in turn be used in many other batches. FarmSoft handles this complex traceability challenge with ease and provides reliable and comprehensive cascading traceability management. Many competitor fresh produce solutions do not support cascading traceability.
Fresh Produce Labeling – fruit quality control
FarmSoft provides many options for fresh produce labeling including many international and customer standards such as HACCP, ISO, GlobalGAP, EuroGAP, CanGAP, AsiaGAP, Tesco’s, Aldi, Walmart, Loblaw, USDA, Woolworth’s, Coles, and more.
Packing management – fruit quality control
FarmSoft manages the entire packing process, guiding employees through any tasks (eg: washing, grading, sorting, QC, value adding processes) and capturing the batch processing/packing/manufacturing costs. During this process the packing materials are also tracked to ensure complete traceability of all batch inputs.
Order and contract management – fruit quality control
Record customer contracts and sales orders. You can assign these to Batch Orders to schedule production for specific outputs and product specifications. Outputs can be easily tracked to the customer who ordered them. Automatically manage the balance of customer orders.
Sales and dispatch – fruit & food quality control
FarmSoft caters for many different dispatch processes including, manual, pick sheet based, mobile based, mobile bar code scanning and more… Full shipping container management is included. Invoices of various formats can also be generated (these can be shared with your accounting solution as required). A dispatch monitoring screen can be used to monitor the progress of orders.
Customer documentation – Quality control for fruit & vegetable, food, flowers, animal feed, and more...
Associate specific documentation with each customer, when orders are ready for shipping FarmSoft will present the correct documentation for printing (or emailing).
Increase customer confidence – fruit quality control
When your customers know you have a state of the art fruit quality control system, their confidence and perceived value in your fresh produce is increased. This is an important part of any supplier to customer relationship.
Color and quality control in fresh produce: Traditional solutions vs AI
Fresh fruits and vegetables are a critical ingredient for food companies that make anything from juices and smoothies through to sauces, pastes, and pulps.
The characteristics of fresh produce differ by variety and season, unlike with many other raw materials. This variability creates challenges in the manufacturing process, and in delivering the quality customers expect in finished products.
Measuring quality in fresh produce
Defining fresh produce quality parameters and their measurement for acceptance is more complex compared to other raw ingredients. Uniformity, ripeness, color, gloss, and absence of defects are just some of the components of quality. Evaluating them can be subjective — in other words, done manually — or objective, when handled by a machine.
But the visual appearance of fruits and vegetables is universally accepted as the first quality determinant.
Color is an important parameter because it directly affects the appearance of the final product. If there is color variance in fresh produce, corrective actions in the manufacturing process become necessary to ensure the perception of quality in the final product.
In short, failure to meet fresh produce color criteria can adversely impact cost and quality in the finished product. This applies to a wide range of food industry items.
Stage Five: Analyzing Fresh Produce Quality Control Trends and Patterns Using Big Data
solution automatically transmits collected data from the mobile app through to a centralized dashboard, giving the same level of insight to the entire supply chain. This starts from growers and includes marketing companies, wholesalers, retailers and even the end-consumers. This data can be collected by growers, marketing companies, wholesalers, and retailers and stored on the cloud, so that they can achieve deeper analysis into the ‘whys’ of the information that is collected. Think trends, patterns, anomalies and root cause detection. As your data is the most accurate it can be, your data is also top quality – great news for data analytics projects.
With so many benefits to this technology, it looks like the future is going to be an automated one! If you want to hear more about how it works, let’s set up a call and we can walk you through it.