All Hail Defenders of the Food Chain
October 26, 2020 
Decco now boasts a food safety business unit that brings sanitizer innovation to the packinghouse.
Photo courtesy of Decco
As Boomer Cardinale maintains a keen eye on the downstream crop market, the Director of Marketing and Business Development with Decco realizes one thing: “The distance between the field and the storefront is getting shorter,” he says.
In turn, the postharvest industry is “compelled,” Cardinale says, to protect the food chain from not only natural decay but also plant disease and human pathogens on fresh and stored produce in the channel.
“Even before the food value chain — and our daily lives — were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, there was little doubt that food safety is the prevailing concern among both grocers and consumers worldwide,” Cardinale says. “Growing and harvesting crops is only half the battle in crop protection.”
In response, Decco, under parent company UPL Ltd., has built a food safety business unit to address food safety and worker safety concerns. The new unit is already bringing sanitizer innovations to the packing house through the company’s ArcAqua advanced ozone sanitation process and its ChillSafe hydrogen peroxide sachets for long-haul transport and cold storage.
To meet the challenge of the next global disruption, Cardinale believes no greater knowledge exists in food handling than in artificial intelligence (AI).
“Once 5G networks are more prevalent, innovations in AI will rapidly increase our knowledge of where, how, when, and who grew what crop from the seed to the grocery store,” he says. “This level of data will provide critical pivot points for shifting and keeping the food value chain continuously optimized while reducing food waste and ensuring against food insecurity.”
MAINTAINING STANDARDS
The most pressing need facing growers today, according to Elad Mardix, President of Clarifruit, is the ability to perform more quality control tests, anywhere they need, in an objective and consistent way that is easily sharable with their customers in real time.
“Traditionally, quality control has been performed at fixed places only, such as a testing room at a packing house,” Mardix says. “It is also performed on a very limited sample size, approximately one promil of actual supply, given the manual testing process is both labor and time consuming. Finally, there is very limited objective data that is being shared with other participants in the supply chain, resulting in a significant amount of rejections and price renegotiations. The COVID-19 pandemic and the recent labor shortage have amplified those key challenges even more.”
When it comes to standardizing the way produce is evaluated today, Mardix says one of the key challenges throughout the supply chain is that people “speak different languages.”
“Utilizing an objective and consistent method for quality evaluation — from the grower, throughout the packer or marketing company, to the retailer — would result in less rejections and price renegotiations and maximization of revenue opportunities due to better matching of supply quality to customer specs,” Mardix says.
Meanwhile, the “weakest link” in the fresh produce supply chain is the grower, Mardix says.
“A shipment rejection may represent a margin loss for a marketing company or a retailer, but for a single grower it could represent a whole season of crop and family livelihood that just went to the drain,” he says. “The issue is that most growers don’t perform quality control because it is too expensive and simply inaccessible. We are here to change that — to provide a simple, mobile app that would allow any grower in the world to perform quality control wherever she wants, with the quality standards of her customers, and in a very cost-effective fashion.”
QUALITY COUNTS
Citing a September 2019 survey by YouGov, Devendra Chandani, the co-founder and Head of Business Development at Intello Labs, notes that about 80% of produce consumers consider quality to be the top factor for making purchase decisions, while about 68% are willing to pay more for better-quality produce.
Additionally, Chandani notes, in the steadily increasing market of fruit exports, grower/producers can attain a 30% price premium over U.S. domestic pricing (i.e., Northwest and California fresh cherry exports to China and the Pacific Rim).
However, the quality requirements for exports are stringent vs. domestic standards. Uniformity of quality, size, and ripeness are key to maintaining market premium price and competitive position, Chandani says. This means retailers and exporters are compelled to source the best quality produce that will meet the target export market’s standards to include paying premium prices.
“Subjective quality parameters are no longer adequate to maintain uniform, high-quality standards, especially across multiple growers and various U.S. and international production regions,” Chandani says. “AI can now play a critical role in channeling the right product to the right market at the right time to maximize profits and reduce shrink while creating a data collection system on which to build management insight and decision making. Imaging and AI are now available to be customized to meet each company’s specific products, packs, and needs, with digitized records.”
Retail, food service, and export markets will continue to push growers/shippers/processors to adopt this automation of quality assessment, according to Chandani.
“Product quality can now be digitized, measured, and memorialized at any and all points from farm gate, through distribution, to the consumer purchase point,” he says. “This data can be driven by any company and integrated throughout the supply chain. Once digitized, quality-related functions can be reduced in cost while simultaneously becoming more quantifiable and reportable.”
Supply and fresh produce consumption vary by markets, Chandani says, noting that a wide range of tropicals is increasing in U.S. consumption.
“Many of these products are unknown throughout our distribution channels and thus can benefit from AI technology to standardize grading and inspection,” Chandani says. “As an exciting next step in our company’s evolution, we are now moving into the development of pre-harvest ripeness, sizing, and uniformity assessments, which will further allow growers to determine the perfect time of harvest to maximize profits and reduce costs.”
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