Quality starts in the orchard, not at the packhouse

It is tempting to think of quality as something that happens at the end — a sorting table, a grading line, someone deciding what goes in the box. In agricultural supply that view is expensive. By the time a consignment reaches grading, almost everything that determines its grade has already happened, and sorting can only decide what to do about it.

What is decided long before harvest

• Variety, and whether it suits the market the fruit is going to
• How the crop was managed through the growing season
• When the harvest is timed, relative to transit and destination
• How the product is handled in the first hours after picking

Harvest timing is the one buyers most often leave to the supplier, and the one that most often causes a dispute. Fruit picked for a two-day journey is not fruit picked for a two-week one. If the destination is agreed before harvest rather than after, the argument does not happen.

Why we ask about your market first

When an enquiry arrives, our first questions are usually about where the product is going and how it will be sold, rather than about volume. It sounds like a commercial question. It is a technical one: the answer changes what we select, when we pick it and how we pack it.