Produce shippers today have more needs from their packaging suppliers than just to be supplied with packaging materials. One of the needs that has become increasingly important of late is support for traceability programs.

At Sambrailo Packaging in Watsonville, CA, traceability support is one of the important services offered to customers, according to Jim Scattini, vice president of sales and marketing.

Jim Scattini, vice president of sales and marketing at Sambrailo, with Tony Cadiente, vice president of product development.From the time customers first began asking for the company’s support for produce traceability initiatives several years ago, Sambrailo has “been at the forefront of accommodating the grower-shipper” in their traceability programs, Mr. Scattini told The Produce News March 8.

“We have to be well-versed” on all of the different traceability systems being used in the industry, Mr. Scattini said. HarvestMark is among the more popular of those systems, “but there are others out there” as well — such as FreshQC — which are being used by shippers. “Some systems might be proprietary” to a particular shipper, and “the next shipper” may have a different system, “one that they developed on their own. We have to be well-versed in each and every one of them on behalf of our customers, because they are different.”

Sambrailo, which, among other things, provides its proprietary and patented “Mixim” line of clamshells and trays to the fresh strawberry industry, must “be able to adjust when we are labeling” an order of clamshells for each specific customer, Mr. Scattini said. It is essential to “put the correct amount of clams back in the master carton that matches [that particular customer’s] palletization.”

Each batch of clamshells and matching trays has a unique code within a specified range. Those are delivered to the customer’s warehouse. During the harvest “the field truck comes in and picks up the trays and the matching sets of clamshells” and takes them to a particular field. The field supervisor reads the code with a scan gun and then enters data, including the field being harvested, the date and time packed, and the crew doing the harvesting for all codes within the specified range. They can enter “as much information as [they] want,” he said. Once the data is entered, it can be retrieved by swiping the code.

Some shippers even have the data available on their websites so it can be accessed by customers or by consumers simply by scanning the code on the clamshell.

The traceability systems have benefit beyond the food-safety aspects, Mr. Scattini noted. They are also “very beneficial to a farmer who wants to analyze how his field did compared to last year,” for example. “There are so many variables when you are growing,” and data on any of those variables can be entered into the system and retrieved with the code. That data can then help a grower answer such questions as “Did I grow the right variety this year?” or “Did I apply my water at the right time?”

There are other services offered by Sambrailo as well, including inventory management, which, along with the clamshells and trays, constitute “the whole packaging system,” offered by the company, Mr. Scattini said.

With the 2013 strawberry harvest rapidly approaching its peak in Southern California and soon to start in the Watsonville district, the company was “geared up for the season and prepared, like we always are at this time of year,” he said.

Among the features of the “Mixim” line of strawberry clamshells are clear, smooth walls and a volume capacity that enables the clamshell to hold “the exact amount of berries that you need, so you are not giving away fruit.” Over the course of a season, “that is very significant” and “helps improve yields,” he said.

In addition, the “Mixim” pallet configuration allows shippers to get more clamshells on a pallet, he said. That is “very economical to somebody who is looking to save money on freight.”