How Social Media, Sustainability and Smart Tech are Reshaping the Industry
Technology’s impact on fresh produce isn’t only about making a change; it’s continued improvement.
Technology is transforming the fresh produce supply chain from farm to table. Here we explore how social media, sustainability and smart tech are reshaping the industry.
Social Media: An Unlikely Driver of Fresh Produce Changes
Some technology is less tangible than an optical sorter, but that doesn’t change the impact it can have on the industry. Consider social media. While it is not growing technology in a classic sense, it is a vehicle that has driven on-farm activities as much as any farm truck.
For example, in the world of sweetpotatoes, the purple-skinned, white-fleshed murasaki varietal is seeing increasing consumer demand to the point that many farms are planting more and more acres around it and offering new product lines. Why do consumers want it?
“People shop with their eyes, and they eat with their eyes,” said Autumn Campbell, sales manager for Arkansas sweetpotato grower Matthews Ridgeview Farms. “[Murasaki sweetpotatoes] are beautiful, so they look good on plates and combined with other sweetpotatoes.”
That visual appeal works well in the world of social media, according to Michelle Grainger, executive director of the North Carolina Sweetpotato Commission.
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“The culinary world is always looking to do something different on the plate and to have pop,” Grainger explained. “And that ties into your social media influencers who are taking the pictures and are posting about the latest creation that they were able to enjoy.”
From Social to Sustainability
Since social media means a shorter distance between farm and fork, it allows consumers to gain information — and demand greater action — on topics
that are important to them. Topics that include sustainability.
Sustainable packaging is an area of growing interest. In the past three years of The Packer’s Fresh Trends reports, respondents have consistently rated biodegradable packaging as a key way the fresh produce industry can promote sustainability.
“Consumers are really interested in packaging right now, and for good reason; it’s the biggest and usually first touch point most consumers are going to have with their fresh produce,” said Jeana Cadby, environment and climate director for Western Growers Association, which represents fresh produce farmers in Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico.
She pointed out that there are a lot of ways packaging can be sustainable. There is the direct way that most consumers likely think about — packaging material that is recyclable or biodegradable, or as minimal as can still get the job done — but she said that roughly 90% of the work of packaging is done before a product reaches the consumer.
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Take lettuce, for example: “As soon as you pick it, the job of the packaging is to keep it as alive and fresh for as long as it possibly can. That itself is a huge technological marvel,” she said. “When we think about how our produce network is set up, it’s actually really incredible how far a bag of lettuce can travel and still be fresh when it comes to consumers.”
The more bags of lettuce — or clamshells of strawberries or packs of mushrooms and so on — that reach consumers fresh and stay fresh long enough to be eaten means less food waste, another angle of sustainability.
Smart Tech Has Changed Labor
Victoria Lopez — marketing and business development manager for Fox Packaging and Fox Solutions, fresh produce packaging makers and equipment distributors — sees technology in produce primarily answering questions of sustainability.
“How can we be sustainable, not just with packaging materials, but how can we be responsible with resources?” she said. “How can we be responsible with talent?”
Large infrastructure using artificial intelligence (AI) is helping with that now, Lopez explained.
“The advancements of technology have supported the flexibility and adaptability of our ability to process and get food to the store shelves,” she said. “With technologies, we’re able to determine what size produce is and how fancy it is.”
She gave the example of the Newtec Celox-P-DUAL-UHD, an optical sorter distributed by Fox Packaging that uses AI to assess photos taken of every potato that goes through for characteristics such as size and flaws across several different potato varieties.
“It can sort up to 13 different categories, identifying decay, rot, greening, holes,” Lopez described, adding that the programming allows it to adapt to new defects as it encounters them.
“The AI has been trained to recognize good versus bad potatoes just like how a human would learn, but faster,” she added.
Though the point of smart technologies isn’t to replace human labor, when it does, it also opens up the opportunity for operations to reallocate their talent, Lopez continued.
“It creates more growth opportunities for your workforce, whether it means becoming a lead, a supervisor, perhaps even a manager, or creating new departments — wherever there may be a gap,” she said, adding that identifying gaps is the point of automation. “Where is too much time being consumed in the process, and how can we make it more efficient? That’s where the innovation and creativity comes into place with a lot of this technology.”
Ultimately, she called AI a powerhouse for the future of the fresh produce industry that will arm people like operations and facilities managers to get deeper insights with real-time information.
Focus on a More Efficient Future
AI in agtech isn’t new, despite the growing public attention and interest.
“We’ve had laser weeders that use machine learning to identify weeds and help with reducing a lot of that labor that goes into weeding a field,” Cadby gave as an example. But she thinks the industry has only just started scratching the surface of the possibilities.
“It’s really fun to talk about the really big, exciting things like the giant laser weeders or the handpickers that are going to come out and increase efficiency and pick in the middle of the night,” she said. The big advancements will come in the “boring stuff,” she continued, technologies that answer the question, “How do we just make things more efficient?”
“For example, you have the laser weeder that’s out there weeding, but maybe it can also be taking images and tell you when you it’s identifying some sort of pathogen in the field,” she said. “Maybe it can do an early, super targeted identification of that pathogen, and it helps to capture that before it spreads to the rest of the field. That’s an example of doing more using the tools that we already have, or fewer passes in the field or resources generally.”
Less-flashy tools that make it easier for producers to make good, data-based decisions are also where Cadby sees the future of technology in produce. She offered Western Growers’ Green Link project as an example of such an effort that examines how to advance food safety with innovative technology.
“It’s using aggregated data to pull the industry together and design this more resilient and safer ecosystem for growers. I think that’s really cool,” she said. “It’s just exciting that we have these kinds of tools at our fingertips now that we can use to really make these educated decisions.”
Lopez described the future of technology in the fresh produce industry as being “turnkey;” smart technologies and partners that help operators throughout the supply chain make informed decisions from data that translate into improvements.
“I think technology is broader than people give it credit for,” she said, pointing out that it’s not just machines and software but also new approaches and processes. “Technology is hand in hand with innovation, and innovation is a supporter of anything that helps make improvements.”
Source: www.thepacker.com
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