Donna Smit, EastPack Ltd (New Zealand)

How does your company use RFID technology?
Each year, EastPack Ltd sorts, packs, stores and forwards to export a significant share (16%) of New Zealand’s kiwifruit crop. Our work is very challenging, especially during the 24x7 working conditions at the peak of the growing season. We have to be able to go into our coolstores and quickly find kiwifruit with specific attributes – for example, kiwifruit of a certain variety, size, or pack type. Often, we get an order just a few hours before the fruit has to be on a ship!

To make this process less nightmarish, we put RFID tags on every pallet and RFID readers on every forklift. Now, whenever a forklift picks up or drops off a pallet, the system automatically identifies where in the store this occurred and instantly transmits the relevant data back to our inventory management system. We can now quickly find and retrieve any pallet in our stores with minimum reshuffling of the other pallets.


Have your employees benefitted from the RFID technology?
The workers were sometimes a bit slow to warm up to it – it’s always hard to change habits – but they quickly saw how much easier and more efficient it made their work.

Before we installed the system, a forklift operator would consult a computer to find out where in the store the requested type of kiwifruit was located, and then he would drive his forklift to that spot. But all too often, the fruit wasn’t there anymore. Maybe another forklift driver who was looking for some other kind of kiwifruit had moved pallets around; or maybe someone made a mistake when typing into the log in the computer in the first place. Whenever that happened, the forklift operator would have to start manually hunting for the right kind of fruit, digging out pallets until he found what he needed, and then putting them all back. And often this was happening in a high-pressure, ‘rush-rush’ atmosphere.

Now, thanks to the RFID system, the kiwifruit is almost always where the computer says it is. The forklift operators are much less frustrated, because it’s easier, quicker and less stressful for them to find what they are looking for.


Do your customers benefit from it as well?
Absolutely! Our main customer ZESPRI – the New Zealand kiwifruit industry marketer – is extremely pleased with the vastly improved quality of service we provide them thanks to this system. They love what RFID has enabled us to do. They even thanked us in front of their Board.


What is your vision for RFID in the future – both at EastPack and in general?
At EastPack, we only use RFID in our warehouses now. But we’re starting to think about the many ways RFID could help us out in the fields, when we put the kiwifruit into wooden bins. Some bins get stored conventionally, and some get stored in special atmospheres. It’s a question of inventory management, just like in the coolstores. We’re also starting to brainstorm about how our RFID-based system could add value to our customer’s customers: the end users who are buying and eating New Zealand kiwifruit all over the world. RFID could help with food safety initiatives by enabling traceability programmes, for example. The technology could be the basis for adding value to the brand, in the eyes of the shopper.

Beyond the kiwifruit industry, I think there are endless possibilities for RFID in industry settings. Any warehouse, any company that needs to count or locate items would benefit from RFID in the same ways we have. I really cannot emphasize enough the difference RFID has made to our operations at EastPack.


EastPack Ltd sorts, packs, stores and forwards to export a significant share of New Zealand’s $1 billion-plus kiwifruit crop. They are a grower-owned company with a reputation for consistently delivering one of the highest orchard gate returns (OGR) in the New Zealand kiwifruit industry.