Advertisement
Published: October 7th 2011
Edit Blog Post
I am nearing the end of my job as an avocado packer/grader at Apata Ltd. in Whangarei.
So far, I have done three type of work at Apata, tray prepper, avocado packer and grader. I think I suck the most as a grader as I have not been asked to grade for a long time. I think I only did grading for one week out of my entire time there.
Grading is divided into three types, Tag 1 for export, Tag 2 for local sales and Tag 3 to restaurants. Basically, Tag 1 fruit is the highest grade which means the fruit must have hardly any blemish , protrusions or ridging (uneven, rough surface). The worse Tag 3 actually goes to the restaurants and the others go on to be made into guacamole and avocado oils, etc.
Grading is really tough as you need to catch the inprefection as the fruit is rolling on the belt. At one time, 10 fruits can be rolling by. At times, when I take just awhile longer to decide if a fruit should be put into Tag 2, 10 fruits have rolled by.
Grading can really be stressful as well because
the growers get unhappy if too much of their fruits get rejected from export and our packhouse relies on growers choosing us over many, many other packhouses that we try to keep as many of their fruits in export. Export apparently is where the big bucks is. So sometimes, when a certain grower has a very bad batch of fruit, and the reject rate is high, the supervisors actually check the local fruits to ensure that we are not rejecting too much. It can get to the point where if fruits are particular batch for a certain grower that we will sometimes need to lower our standards to let more fruits through. Graders are constantly having their standards monitored and the reject rate and numbers are scrutinized every time.
Avocado packing can be tough as sometimes the lines can speed up when one batch of of growers have a lot of fruit of the size you are packing. Packing lines are organized according to the number of fruits in a box. We have fruits as small as 30 fruits per box or as little as 16 fruits per box. I have never seen such large avocados before, but even the 20 fruits per box, already have super large fruits. The 16s are massive! I think the reaction time of the floor supervisor is not good as some lines are swatting flies and some lines have fruit overflowing the belt. The supervisor do not shut down the fly swatting lines and direct the packers to help those ultra busy lines.
Tray prepping is the easiest of all the task in the packhouse. It just requires you to feed the packing lines with boxes that you line with the correct tray. Normally one person watches up to four lines. The only time tray prepping becomes challenging is when they change either the fruit number or box type during the brand.
My packhouse packs avocados from many independent growers but they are just packed into three major brands Avanza, Sunny Days and Skylark. From what I have observed, the Avanza brand ships to Japan, Sunny Days to Singapore and Skylark to Australia. I do not know how they decide what brand to pack. I will need to ask one of the supervisors to find out.
Apata is also a huge supporter of LEAN and they have a suggestion form for anyone to fill in with suggestions that can help improve the work around the packhouse. I wrote in a suggestion to standardized the manner of tray prepping to ensure that the packers are able to pack more consistently and my suggestion actually won the suggestion of the week! I won NZ$20 vouchers to the Mad Butcher, a meat shop chain in NZ. I am happy and the vouchers will be great as meat is really expensive in NZ.
In any case, in short, I did learn a lot about avocados. The job can sometimes be monotonous especially when the lines are slow then time can really crawl. However, the people who I work with have been extremely helpful and nice to us strange Asian people. To those back in Malaysia, you should be grateful to know that the avocados you buy are of the utmost best quality as only the best are exported. If they don't look too good when you see them in the store, it may be the fault of the importer or the grocery store. 😊
Advertisement
Tot: 0.087s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 53; dbt: 0.0662s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb