Packing and cold storage
From accepted produce to a pallet ready to ship — keeping the thread back to the farm intact.
Planning a run
A production plan says what you intend to pack against the orders you hold, before you commit stock to it. Use it when you are juggling several orders and limited produce — it stops you packing for one buyer and leaving another short.
Running a pack
- Start a pack run and choose which goods receipts it will use.
- Choose the product you are packing into — the pack size and specification.
- Pack. Record the number of cartons produced.
- Record write-offs — anything rejected during packing, with the reason.
- Complete the run. It gets a finished-goods lot code.
The lot code is the thread. From it you can reach back to every farm, field and spray that went into those cartons — and forward to every pallet and buyer that received them.
Packing several suppliers into one lot is normal and often unavoidable. Just be aware of what it costs you: if one of those farms turns out to have a problem, every carton in the lot is implicated, not just their share. Where you have a supplier you are unsure about, keeping them in their own lot limits the damage.
Building pallets
- Create a pallet and give it a destination.
- Add cartons from your finished lots, recording how many from each.
- Close the pallet when it is complete.
A pallet can hold cartons from more than one lot. SoftFarm keeps track of exactly how many came from where, so a query about one pallet does not become a guess.
Cold chain
Record your storage zones — cold rooms, holding areas — and the temperatures you keep them at. Buyers ask for this, and it is far easier to keep a running record than to reconstruct one.
Storage records also answer a question that comes up after a problem: what else was in that cold room at the same time?
Checking the numbers add up
Mass balance compares what came in against what was packed, palletised, allocated to orders, shipped and written off. When those do not reconcile, SoftFarm shows you where.
Almost always the cause is a missing record rather than missing produce — a write-off nobody entered, cartons moved without being logged. Worth finding either way: a buyer or auditor who spots it first will assume the worse explanation.
Check it weekly. A small discrepancy found this week is a five-minute fix; the same one found in three months is an investigation.