Five packhouse KPIs worth tracking (and three that waste your time)

The five that matter

Packout % per run and per grower: the share of received fruit that left as saleable product. Falling packout for one grower is the earliest, cheapest quality signal you will get.

Recorded waste: how much was graded out and why. Waste you recorded is a process number you can work on; waste you did not record becomes a dispute.

Unaccounted loss: input minus packed minus recorded waste, per run. This is the silent shrink, and it should sit near zero; when it does not, something is leaving the shed without a record.

Rotation age: the age of your oldest available lot against its shelf life. One number tells you whether first-expiry-first-out is actually happening.

Time from receival to cold: for perishable lines, the strongest predictor of shelf-life complaints you control.

Three that usually waste time

Total volume packed, on its own: it flatters busy weeks and hides margin. Volume only means something next to packout and waste.

Average packout across all crops and growers: averaging blueberries with bananas produces a number nobody can act on. Keep comparisons within a crop and grower.

Anything measured monthly: a month-end spreadsheet tells you what went wrong three weeks too late to fix it. The useful cadence is per run and per day.

Get them as by-products, not projects

Every number above falls out of records you already make: receivals, pack runs with graded outputs and waste, dispatches. If capturing them requires a separate reporting exercise, the exercise will be skipped in peak season, precisely when the numbers matter most. Fernable computes packout, waste, unaccounted loss and lot age live from the day’s normal records, so the KPIs exist without anyone compiling them.