Delivering Victoria’s quality fruit to the world requires close scrutiny to ensure products reach markets in top condition.
With the goal of improving the overall quality and freshness of exported fruit, a joint project with Agriculture Victoria and Queensland’s Department of Agriculture and Fisheries is using the latest 4 and 5G technology to demonstrate the benefit to industry of real-time monitoring export shipments.
Agriculture Victoria research scientist Glenn Hale said ‘real-time’ data loggers are a small and inexpensive device that shows you the temperature and location of your product anywhere in the world.
‘Until recently, the challenge for exporters has been accessing data previously collected from USB loggers in shipments and air freight,’ he said.
‘Exporters no longer need to rely on importers finding USB loggers hidden among cartons of fruit, downloading the data and then sending it back, as data can now be streamed ‘live’ from real-time loggers and viewed online by smart phones, notepads or desktop computers.
‘Data can be seen in ‘real time’, which means if there are any issues then exporters can respond immediately rather than waiting for their produce to arrive at the end of the supply chain in less than ideal condition, which would be too late to prevent fruit diminishing in overall quality,’ he said.
‘These loggers also have other functions such as measuring relative humidity, light, shock or vibration and location so that the entire journey can be tracked from orchard to final destination.
‘Monitoring the supply chain in real-time makes all the links more accountable for their actions as loggers can be initially set up with temperature thresholds so that an alert is sent via email or text if the threshold is breached.
‘A recent example is an exporter placed a real-time logger in a container, and they received an alert message notifying them that temperatures were slowly increasing above a set temperature.
‘The exporter quickly contacted the shipping line company who were able to investigate and adjust the settings on the reefer container which resulted in the temperatures decreasing.
‘This potentially saved the fruit from being damaged and resulting in an insurance claim a few weeks later when the fruit would have arrived in export markets.’
Information from real-time data loggers can highlight issues that exporters are unaware of, therefore providing an opportunity for improvements along the supply chain.
