Pears are known globally as a ‘difficult to label’ product, at least in our world of labelling. Often packed ex coolstore so the fruit tends to “sweat” as it moves through the packhouse and along with the pear skin, which can be russeted, this makes labelling pears really challenging. Our customers’ Fern Ridge Fresh and Midland packhouse near Nelson asked if we could assist in any way to improve pear labelling percentages for their high value Piqa®Boo® pear.
We brought Steve Seagraves from our Sinclair Norwich team to New Zealand to review Pink Lady labelling plus take a look at this specific pear problem. Drilling down on the high value Piqa®Boo® pear, we decided to run 2 additional existing materials alongside our control product. We had immediate success utilising the first trial material. Piqa®Boo® pear labelling percentages at Midland’s increased immediately from 75 to 95%. A great result and I wish we could get the same result on other hard to label products such as wet gold kiwifruit (already tested).
The lesson here for me is never give up, keep investing in the time and R&D, try different things and don’t think you have to all the answers.