The produce industry has many intricacies that make it one of the toughest businesses to be in today, yet the rewards of successfully navigating those intricacies are even sweeter. Factors like climate control, food safety, traceability – to name a few – are some of the daily, ever-changing concerns that must be balanced with the simple yet essential tasks of maintaining and growing a company. To achieve success, companies must first deliver reliability to customers and that means making smart partnership choices from the get go. Smart third party logistics partnerships are a vital component of this. Here are some tips our customers have found useful in achieving such relationships.

1. Balance the need for speed with the need for process.
Extreme time sensitivity is an ever-present challenge in the produce world. It also creates the need for a formalized process that manages inventory and delivers quick reports, fast thinking and customer solutions. Availability of reports on inventory and/or daily stock status allows decision makers to feel in control and minimizes anxiety over the unforeseen.

2. If these four walls could talk ...
No exception to the rule of "you never get a second chance to make a first impression", produce facilities and professionals should show care for appearance and health standards. With perishable product, the customer needs to feel confident that their deliveries will be kept at the correct temperature throughout the cold chain and that all food safety and handling practices are certified, standardized and consistently executed.



3. Put food safety in the driver's seat.
At the core, a food logistics partner is in the business of transporting precious, perishable cargo. Period. Consistency, experience and the ability to adapt quickly are good traits of great partners. The challenge here lies in system capabilities, electronic records and clear processes for identifying and separating recalled items as well as minimizing the loss of produce that is still viable. Preparing for and capably dealing with these safety concerns proves the value of smarter partner.

For more information on Smart Partnerships – and to learn what's new at Four Seasons, check out our news page.

Start At The Foundation…

In architecture, if a building’s core foundation isn’t stable then everything built upon it is subsequently shaky and subject to collapse. The same is true in business. Four Seasons, “core foundation” is to provide top quality produce and customer service. We have top quality down pat – Four Seasons works with the finest in the industry. Our mission statement “Growing Ideas and Producing Excellence” has provided a culture of continuous improvement and a driver for our sustainable efforts as, we started implementing green initiatives for the very walls of our own facilities.

Reducing and harnessing our energy use has been of high on our list of priorities for some time. Commercial buildings that earn the ENERGY STAR energy label, like Four Seasons’, use an average of thirty-five percent less energy and carbon dioxide than typical buildings. In terms of our facility, we’re running a multitude of sustainability initiatives focusing on energy, water and resource conservation that further ensure our core foundation of providing truly sustainable service.

Our energy initiatives include a range of projects from energy management and lighting retrofits, to power quality and dock door retrofits. Our young energy management project reduced consumption of electricity by more than half a million kW per year by implementing refrigeration-system software. We also installed a power quality system to improve power quality and lower energy costs. Last, Four Seasons’ lighting retrofit project – which replaced metal halide with T8 fluorescent lamps – yields an annual reduction of over 900,000 kWh, provides a 40% increase in lighting levels and has paid for itself in less than two years … a sustainable return on investment.

Most recently, Four Season’s office was retrofitted with an HVAC controls upgrade, making the building “smart” with CO2 sensors and precise control of ventilation for heating and cooling. Natural gas and electricity savings to date have already placed this project on track to match the payback of the lighting retrofit. So I ask this question: what are you doing to increase the sustainability (if not profitability) of your business?