If you had wandered into Philip Short’s kitchen a few years ago, you would have seen piles of homemade packages.
“For three years, our kitchen was full of packaging,” says the farmer, wholesaler, and retailer of tender fruit from Vineland Station, Ont.
“I was constantly designing fruit packaging. If I thought it had some merit, I’d put it in the kitchen and just walk by it for several days. Thankfully, my wife put up with me.”
It was a humble start, but Short’s determination to create a better package for peaches and other tender fruit has paid off.
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This year, more than half of Ontario’s peach crop was sold in the clear plastic, stackable, lidded baskets made by Short’s company, Vortex Packaging Niagara Inc.
It’s a remarkable story driven by Short’s ability to see a situation from the vantage point of others, which is a valuable lesson on any farm.
Like most fruit growers, Short was content with the traditional oval-shaped cardboard baskets and their distinctive hoop handle.
Sure, they took a lot of space in the packing plant before harvest, but they were relatively cheap and easy to pack.
But ever since he had started his farm, NBF Produce Ltd., in 1972, Short had also been retailing and wholesaling fruit from other farms, totalling 500 acres of tender fruit.
That allowed him to look at the baskets from a different point of view.
“I listened to retailers being very disgruntled about the display at the store level and complaining about the quality of the fruit,” he says. “It was clear they wanted something new.”
Topping the list was “shrink,” everything from spoilage to customers grabbing fruit from another basket. In the tender fruit business, shrink tops 30 percent.
Retailers and wholesalers also disliked the traditional baskets because they couldn’t be stacked. These were old complaints, but Short realized they could no longer be ignored.
Stores were cutting labour costs, which meant fewer staff in the produce area to fuss over the problematic baskets.
“For me, everything is driven by sales,” says Short. “I saw sales of tender fruit flat lining and, in some cases, declining. Something needed to be done.”
So he started tinkering.
“My first prototypes were ugly,” he says. “There was one with a cardboard base and a nylon mesh over it. I can laugh about it now, but it looked like a hair net.”
It was soon apparent that the solution would be some sort of stackable plastic clamshell. And while the oblong baskets he eventually created may seem straightforward, the opposite is true.
Stackable and lidded only partly satisfied retailers: the consumer also had to be happy.
Retail testing found that retaining the handle was key, as was being able to see all of the fruit.
Opaque polypropylene didn’t make the cut, but crystal-clear PET, which is the plastic used in pop bottles, caused an issue with consumers worried about waste. As a result, Short uses at least 50 percent recycled PET.
Paper labels were a recycling issue because of their adhesive, so he uses clear plastic ones that can be easily peeled off.
The biggest bonus was discovering that cardboard was actually wicking moisture from the fruit.
Using plastic not only reduced shrink by 20 percentage points, but it also extended shelf life by seven days.
“That just fell into our lap,” says Short.
Wholesalers, retailers and consumers loved it, but growers weren’t keen at first, mostly because it cost more.
In fact, when he presented the idea to the marketing board, he was bluntly told, “it’s not going anywhere.”
The board’s view changed when Short said he had been working with buyers from Loblaws who wanted to go exclusively with it in their Ontario stores and expected it would generate higher sales.
In the end, Short says, the key was finding something that “worked for everyone: the grower, the wholesaler, the retailer and the consumer.”
When that happens, it’s also a win for you.
That’s why this story has wider implications. Farming today is about working in teams made up of family members, employees, suppliers, buyers and professionals such as accountants, agrologists and other consultants.
The most successful teams are those in which the members understand each other’s point of view and look for those win-win situations.
Short looked at the value chain he was part of, saw that not everyone was happy and found an innovative way to improve it.
It is an approach that can be applied to any situation.
