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Northern Cherries
The packing house is ready to manage the incoming cherries with barcodes for more efficent tracking.
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Northern Cherries 2
A Kelowna cherry grower has created greater traceability of food with help from the province of BC and feds.
Tracking food is essential to public health, yet it’s not as easy as one might think. Consider fruits and vegetables. Knowing the details about their journey from field to packing house, to cooler and retailers is possible, but can often involve a number of manual, time-consuming and inefficient steps.
Hardeep Khela, owner of Kelowna’s Northern Cherries has been able to take a step towards greater efficiency with a $38,000 grant from the federal and provincial governments to improve traceability. Khela applied through the Traceability Knowledge Transfer program through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership in 2018 for equipment costing more than $100,000 to reduce manual entry and tracking from field to cooler for the company’s fresh cherries. Northern Cherries was one of 20 BC recipients.
“We have to track everything,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if we have manual or electronic [systems].”
Northern Cherries has about 10 or 15 cherry varieties throughout the 200 acres of orchards and also packs cherries for another four or five growers. While the new tracking system isn’t fully set up yet, Khela explains that it is already proving that things will be easier.
“We have a number of people picking cherries, we have all their information. And our field supervisor, he assigns who is picking which row each day,” she explains. “We have a barcode given to every picker. We scan those barcodes when we do the count.”
Barcodes allow Khela to keep track of who picked which buckets, how many they picked and what to pay a piece work picker. The buckets are scanned when they enter the packing house and the picker information is stored, then replaced with data about the cherry variety, block number, picking date and time, the lot and other details as the fruit goes into the bin.
“On the packing line, all that information, that’s where the software helps a lot,” she says. “I will be able to manage the incoming fruit with the barcodes more efficiently.”
Grower information is also added to ensure those who have their cherries packed by Northern Cherries have the same traceability benefits.
“It is all entered into the computer, then we pack one lot at a time,” she says. “Only one block, one variety is packed at one time.”
The block’s information goes through the computer system and labels are generated as boxes are packed. The high-efficiency labelers purchased with the grant money and Northern Cherries’ own funds automatically apply the labels complete with the barcode and detailed information to the boxes. It’s a vast improvement over the old system where the line had to stop every 20 or 25 boxes in order to do the labelling or change over for a new lot.
Now, the entry of each lot’s information happens from scanning buckets and bins prior to their entry into the packing line. As the boxes come off the line there is an automatic tally of what goes into the cooler. The new system is faster and more accurate.
“I would go into the cooler and count with my notebook,” she says. “Sometimes you count the boxes one time, two times, three times. Now the computer does it all.”
While this doesn’t complete the whole process for Northern Cherries, the automatic data entry and labelling make everything easier. Because the shipping tracing isn’t automatic or part of the new system yet, Khela must use her existing spread sheets and programs to track the movement of cherries from the cooler to sales outlets. However, the labels on the boxes ensure everything can be sourced back to the place and time it was picked no matter where they end up. In addition to helping with payroll and traceability, Khela believes the new system will also help with physical distancing requirements if COVID-19 protocols are still in place in the summer.
“I think we can get away with fewer people,” she says. “If you have 10 people instead of 20 people, you’re managing your social distancing better than you did. We’ll also be able to bring expenses down.”
She looks forward to a time when everything is integrated into one system from orchard to retailer, but is grateful for this big step towards that.
“Now this should be very good,” she says. “If we have one program from start to end, it will be easier.”