Food Supplier Operational Efficiency

Improving food supplier operational efficiency is critical in today’s increasingly competitive agriculture and business climate. Whether you’re a grower, shipper or processor, managing costs is usually top of mind, especially when your biggest costs include labor and equipment. Improving food supplier operational efficiency means ensuring you’re capably utilizing these valuable resources to streamline your business and create competitive advantage.

The Data You Need to Improve Food Supplier Operational Efficiency

To ensure that growers’ and suppliers’ post-harvest processes are efficient and optimized, it’s essential to have data and insights on important process steps such as:

Cut-to-cool time

Many growers and packers believe that they have consistent cut-to-cool times. Zest Fresh provides pallet-level data that documents actual cut-to-cool times for each pallet and provides the ability to identify and address bottlenecks that impact quality and freshness.

Truck dwell and cycle times

Zest Fresh provides data on how long it takes trucks to get from the field to receiving, the loading dock, reload and back into the field. This data provides insights to identify ways to optimize labor and assets to reduce costs and maximize food supplier operational efficiency.

Precool efficiency

Precooling is an expensive and often limited resource. Zest Fresh enables the ability to improve precool efficiency and effectiveness. With Zest Fresh, you get pallet-level data on the condition and status of each pallet in precooling to know when it’s reached the target temperature, pallet-by-pallet, ensuring each pallet has been precooled properly to maximize its freshness capacity.

Not having the data and insights to properly manage these important processes can have implications on your food supplier operational efficiency, including your bottom line due to increased labor and waste costs, and lead to increased rejection rates by retailers.

Pallet-level Visibility Improves Operational Efficiency

Zest Fresh utilizes advanced, autonomous technologies that are easy to implement, deploy and integrate with your existing systems. It provides growers, packers and shippers with complete field-to-shipment process visibility at the pallet-level to improve food supplier operational efficiency:

IoT sensors

Autonomous sensors placed in each pallet are easy to deploy and require only seconds to activate. They automatically collect data about the condition of each pallet beginning at harvest and through to shipment.

Advanced analytics

Data is analyzed to identify trends, bottlenecks and other issues that impact food supplier operational efficiency and identify ways to improve processes.

Real-time alerts and comprehensive reports

Workers are notified when there are issues with workflows and processes, such as long wait times or precooling inefficiencies so that they can take corrective action and make the right decision every time. Reports provide key insights to guide management and improve decision making.

Zest Fresh improves food supplier operational efficiency by providing the information you need to optimize labor and asset utilization, improve processes, identify issues, reduce costs and improve delivered freshness.

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