Indian company Fresh Survey provide an independent quality inspection service for fresh produce. This is done using NFC technology. This is not new technology but this is the first time it has been used in the grape industry. This is the same tech used for the tap & pay feature of payment applications or even in card transactions.
The process
"We inspect and record our findings in our application with photos embedded with GPS tag, date and time," explains Darshan Patil director at Fresh Survey. "The photos are then uploaded at the server and the average and percentage is calculated. The report is then ready within a minute or two if there's a strong internet connection and the link is ready to share."
This link is then uploaded to a NFC tag which is stuck on the pallets, not per farmer codes, but as per actual pallets packed of the same lot.
"The code manipulation is the reason we came up with a solution like this and also to have a larger sample size available with the buyers of India to distribute pallets not per container report but per pallet report."
The information is gathered at the pack-house, but Fresh Survey are actively working on a free version which will help to gather information at farms as well.
Over 20 plus records are saved and noted with photos and readings, like size, brix, temperature of pack-house, cold storage.
"As of now we are using this app for our employees to make the inspection report and upload it to the NFC tags as per actual farmer's lot. This information will be used by importers and retailers to distribute and allocate pallets to either critical or safe markets. The current market practise is to check only 25-30 boxes on arrival out of 2,600 boxes of a container, this works for large farmer lots, but with India there are majority of small farmers, so there is just two or three MH & GGN codes on the container's papers, but in actual fact there are more than 5-6 lots per container, making it very hard to trace down actual quality of produce in the pallet and that is precisely what we are solving through our services.
"Customers can see exactly what quality of produce is in the pallet and not on just paper. This needs to be done at origin as anyone inspecting quality at origin will have a bigger sample size and a better idea of overall quality of fruit."
This system can let customers know with just a quick scan what's inside the pallet and can help in distribution decisions for importers of India produce like grapes, it can also help exporters in India to keep their records digitally and compare them for analysis on a per farmer basis.
Darshan said this is a significant innovation that they have developed to address the most pressing issue faced by India's grape industry - traceability.
For more information:
Darshan Patil
Fresh Survey Pvt Ltd.
darshan.patil@freshsurvey.in