Kirsty Fontanini, Owner/Manager
I’m Kirsty Fontanini, and we are fifth-generation farmers. We started using ABCpacker – I was looking at several different options, and ABCpacker was the one that really stood out to me. We have gone from a completely manual, handwritten, duplicate book system. With ABCpacker, I was able to start as small as I wanted, and I can add on the features as I want them.
We used to get calls from the markets saying, “Oh, your tally’s out. You’ve done this wrong. You’ve done that wrong.” And since we’ve started using ABCpacker, we haven’t actually had any call from the markets, which is really great.
It’s not difficult to use. It’s actually really, really simple. The support has been amazing, and it’s actually really, really simple to get your head around once you start using it live. I just had to do the training, so it was all very straightforward.
Three years ago, we put in a new grading line. It was quite a manual kind of an older system, and we upgraded, and we’ve put in quite a new system. I was still handwriting the paperwork, and we were still doing all the handwriting of the accounts and things like that. And I thought, we’ve upgraded that one step, and now it’s time to go the next step and get some packaging software. So, I did some Google searching. That’s when I started looking at ABCpacker and I looked at a lot of their competitors, and ABCpacker was definitely the one for me.
ABCpacker does have a direct correlation with the traceability. It traces what comes in, and it traces exactly what goes out, where that fruit came from, what day it was packed. Compliance is just so important now, and to keep those records, and to have something that does that easily and is just ready at your fingertips with all that information is invaluable.
ABC have been extremely adaptable. I have pretty much tailor-made the program to suit how I want it to do things, and they’ve been very, very good, and it’s all been very, very easy to actually adapt it to exactly how I want to use the program. I mean, it’s even good for when we do audits, because we’ve got all that traceability there of incoming, outgoing, without having to hand-write all those records which is what we used to do. So, it’s touch of a button, it’s all there. We can do away with so much paperwork, it’s great.
We are a small family operation. We want the capabilities of the programs that we run to be able to grow with our business, and ABCpacker can definitely do that. I would definitely recommend ABCpacker to other people. I wouldn’t hesitate.
