For seven years, the Dutch IT company Care4It has marketed the Care4Fresh package, specifically for the fresh produce sector. “We focus on the segment of companies with up to 75 employees,” says Hermen Mensink. In the latest version of the package, the computer firm has added a novelty that automatically calculates nutritional value based on recipes.
The ingredients could already be automatically generated based on recipes in the system. A new function is based on the same recipes, the nutritional value is automatically calculated, based on the net amount of an ingredient. Should an ingredient be changed, users can get an overview of the articles that use this ingredient. In this overview, the nutritional value can also either be recalculated or directly adjusted.
“We developed this module in cooperation with the Houwers Groep, an accredited inspection company for food safety. It was quite a job, but we truly have something unique on the market. It’s a welcome addition particularly for the production companies that are part of our clientele. But catering wholesalers and other companies such as pasta factories are also eager to start working with it. Generating product labels is now done practically automatically,” Hermen says.
The Care4Fresh package has been built modularly, which means customers only pay for the modules they use. These modules include purchasing, production, stock, sales, invoices, inONE (for online ordering), management information such as, for instance, margin overviews and coupling to scales, bar codes and the well-known financial packages.
“The major benefit of our package is that we’re not very expensive, but mostly it’s that we’re user-friendly. The entry price is very low and we can easily switch and expand modules. We work both via our own computers and customer’s servers and in the cloud. Major software suppliers often have wonderful packages, but these are quite generic and much less suited to the fresh produce sector, whereas we show important aspects for the fresh produce sector such as tracking and tracing, and the allergens and nutritional value specifications,” Hermen explains.
For the latest version of the package, a ‘PO box system’ has been developed as well, so that customers using the package can exchange orders among themselves without the use of third parties. “The sales orders put in are automatically loaded via EDI, so it saves a lot of time,” Hermen concludes.
For more information:
Hermen Mensink
Care4It
Molenland 2
8024 AL, Zwolle, the Netherlands
T: +31 (0)38 744 00 15
M: +31 (0)6 510 860 14
hermen.mensink@care4it.nl
www.care4it.nl