Innovation drives dried fruit company’s expansion

13 Dec 2012

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One of the three largest food processors, packers and distributors of dried tree fruit in SA, At Source Handmade foods, is set to grow its business locally and overseas following the expansion of its facilities outside Ceres in the Western Cape to handle increased volumes and the installation of new machinery that will double production capacity.

“We now have enough space to incrementally add machinery in parallel, which will allow us to expand capacity even further,” says MD Handri Conradie. “The most important impact, however, is the agility that we now have to serve markets whose volume demands we could not previously accommodate.”

With its core market still being SA, At Source’s largest growth is happening in Australia and the Middle East. “We’ve been involved in those two markets for three years, but until now haven’t been able to be as aggressive as we’ve wanted to because of a lack of capacity,” Conradie says.

Extra space comprised the largest element of the upgrade and expanded the storage of facilities for packaging material, raw materials and finished products. Additional technology was introduced into certain processes, allowing for greater productivity and efficiency. It includes a form-fill-seal machine with multi-head weigher; additional flow wrappers; metal detectors; in-line check-weighers; additional size grading capacity; and an optical sorter, imported from the US.

He explains that the latter machine is able to process fruit five times faster than hand-sorting previously allowed, and represents a major improvement for At Source. The fruit sorted by the optical sorter, which utilises a series of colour-sensitive cameras to grade each item on a conveyor system, still goes through hand-sorting as final quality control.

One of the key elements in the design of the project, explains Conradie, was to allow for greater precision in a process that can be fairly unpredictable. “In the past, we had to rely on statistical sampling to estimate the composition of the crop received from farms, and plan our processing schedule and sales allocation accordingly. The greater speed and accuracy of our new technology allows us to separate the crop into its various size and quality-grades very soon after intake, and prevent surprises later on in the year. This has a tremendous impact on our business.”

The upgrade of the existing 4,000 sq metre processing and packaging facility added an additional 2,600 sq metres. The entire project was financed by the Industrial Development Corporation. In addition to enabling the company to more than double its annual volume throughput, it brought 60 new jobs in addition to the 230 positions already created over the last 10 years.

In this time, Conradie’s family business has evolved from what was primarily an agricultural enterprise to one of the leading integrated agri-businesses in the industry, supplying retailers such as Pick n Pay and Woolworths.

It achieved this growth through a number of innovations - as the originator of soft-eating dried fruit, the company revolutionised the dried fruit category by expanding the consumer base to convert more people to become dried fruit consumers by offering dried fruit in a non-traditional and more accessible format. At Source also produces fruit bars, novel fruit and nut combinations, and its latest signature dried fruit “flatbar” snack, along with products for its own premium healthy snack food brand, Cecilia’s World.

The focus on innovation is indicative of the state of particularly the local market in which it competes.

“Dried fruit is part of South African heritage and in that sense represents a mature market. While traditional dried fruit remains the greatest segment of the market, we see the greatest growth happening in value-added, processed fruit products,” says Conradie.

Source: At Source Handmade Food PTY Ltd