“We’ve never experienced such a high level of quality assurance before. Providing our retail partners line of sight into the harvest and supply chain empowers them with confidence.”
Jack Campbell
CEO at Four Star Fruit
Company
Four Star Fruit
Location
California, USA
Profile
Grower and marketer
of grapes
Challenge
Lack of visibility into their
supply before receiving
Solution
ProducePay
Visibility
A major grower and marketer of table grapes, Four Star Fruit, partnered with ProducePay to expand their supplier network globally, increasing their total fruit volume by 40%. With the help of ProducePay Visibility, they maintained real-time insight into product quality throughout this expanded network to ensure in full, on spec, and on time delivery- reducing rejection rates to nearly 0%.
The challenge:
Expanding their grower network globally while upholding quality.
“Before Visibility, scaling and adding more growers would have meant losing visibility into what was happening on the ground. Quality control would have been very hard, if not impossible. We would have been importing grapes in the dark.”
Jack Campbell
CEO at Four Star Fruit
Seeking to grow their business and deliver continuous supply year-round to their retail partners, Four Star Fruit partnered with ProducePay to build a Predictable Commerce Program that expanded their supplier network into new global regions and markets.
With this new group of growers, Four Star Fruit needed an expanded infrastructure to effectively oversee the quality and operations of this larger program.
Historically, most of their growers had been based in California, where Four Star Fruit was able to implement their own, in-house QC programs. They needed a solution that would ensure their new global supply would uphold the same high-quality standards established on their US farms.
However, with new growers spread across Latin America, implementing similar quality control processes would require significant investment in people, technology, and regional expertise.
Without real-time insight into the expected volumes and quality within each load, as well as shipment tracking and conditions, Four Star Fruit were facing inefficiency in their rapidly scaling operations, which most notably could put their ability to fulfill orders for their retail customers at risk.
They needed a comprehensive solution to enable delivery of high-quality produce at significantly increased scale, and uphold the same standards Four Star Fruit is known for.
The solution:
Creating an effective and efficient supply chain through ProducePay Visibility.
ProducePay created a human and tech-enabled solution that provided total insight into Four Star Fruit’s expanded supply chain to give new confidence in the grapes they were sending to end-buyers. The Visibility solution provided a scalable infrastructure of on-site agronomists, order tracking and a custom-built dashboard that supercharged their ability to effectively scale while upholding quality.
“With ProducePay, we feel in control of our grower network. Even with external growers – we feel like we’re there, on the ground. We can truly execute on high-level quality control, from a distance.”
Jack Campbell
CEO at Four Star Fruit
We leveraged our extensive network of on-site agronomists and offered Four Star Fruit an easy tech-enabled solution that gave them deep visibility management at their fingertips. Our agronomists were dispatched to perform on-site pallet-level QC inspections of each shipment. They began providing the QC data in real-time for Four Star Fruit – enabling them to make key decisions before shipment.
Our solution also includes having a tracker in every shipment. This tracker provides the Four Star Fruit team access to detailed, real-time information about all of their orders: physical location, quality details, and shipping conditions such as temperature, humidity, & light exposure.
As part of the Visibility solution, ProducePay custom-built a dashboard with Four Star Fruit, making everything about their supply – QC data, shipping, order status, documentation (POs, packing list, manifest, etc.) – accessible all in one place. Not only does the dashboard centralize this data; its user experience also makes managing large volumes of supply more efficient, while providing critical order management functionality like order acceptance and direct communications between partners.
The opportunity:
Reducing rejection rates to nearly 0%.
Our comprehensive Visibility solution was the key to not only unlocking growth, but also efficiency. With eyes on all of their produce from farm to final delivery, Four Star Fruit had unprecedented levels of data and insights with which to plan volumes, project deliveries and solve issues faster and smarter. Early QC knowledge empowered them to make data-driven decisions to optimize their supply chain by:
- Working with the grower to swap out inventory.
- Exploring alternative buyer opportunities for
non-spec produce. - Opening dialogues with alternative markets as
quickly as possible.
