What is packout percentage, and how do you calculate it?

The packout formula, and the definition you have to choose

Packout % = (saleable packed weight ÷ received weight) × 100. The arithmetic is trivial. The part that actually determines whether the number means anything is what you count as the numerator, and packhouses split into two camps.

The first definition is packed-to-spec: only the top grade, the fruit that meets the primary customer's specification, counts as saleable. Everything else, lower grades, secondary-market fruit, process-grade product, is excluded even if it eventually sells somewhere. This gives you a strict yield number that tracks how much of the intake met the grower's or the buyer's original target.

The second definition is all saleable output: every unit that leaves the packhouse against an invoice counts, whether it went out as Class 1 to a premium retailer or as Class 2 to a wholesaler. This gives you a commercial recovery number, closer to what the business actually monetized.

Neither definition is wrong, and this guide's worked example below uses the second one for clarity. What matters more than which one you pick is that you pick one and never switch mid-season. A packout that jumps from 78% to 88% because someone started counting Class 2 as saleable halfway through a program looks like an operational improvement to a grower or a buyer reading a report. It is a definition change wearing the costume of a result, and it is the fastest way to lose credibility with a grower who tracks their own numbers against yours.

A worked example through the grade split

Take a single reception of 730 kg of blueberries from one grower block. After grading and packing, the run breaks down as: 520 kg packed to spec as Class 1, 120 kg packed as Class 2 for a secondary buyer, 90 kg diverted to a juicing or processing outlet at a fraction of fresh-market value, and 40 kg written off entirely as grade-out waste, mould, crush damage, or undersize fruit with no commercial home.

Under the packed-to-spec definition, packout is 520 ÷ 730 = 71.2%. Under the all-saleable definition, it is (520 + 120) ÷ 730 = 87.7%, since the Class 2 fruit still shipped against an invoice even though it did not meet the primary spec. The 90 kg diverted to processing sits in a grey zone some packhouses count as saleable at a discount and others exclude entirely because it did not move through the same packing line or carton codes.

The gap between 71.2% and 87.7% on the same 730 kg lot is exactly why the definition choice from the previous section is not academic. A grower comparing their own two runs needs both numbers reported the same way every time, or they will read a definition switch as a 16-point swing in their fruit's performance.

Reading a trend, and what a week-on-week drop actually points at

There is no industry benchmark for packout. It is crop-, grower-, and season-dependent: a stone fruit packhouse in peak season and a citrus packhouse mid-storage season are not comparable, and neither is comparable to itself a year apart if the variety mix shifted. The only useful comparison is a run against your own history for that grower, that block, and that time of season.

A packout that holds steady and then drops for one grower over consecutive deliveries is a signal worth a phone call before the next load arrives, not after. Three things typically sit behind a drop: fruit condition at harvest, most often a picking crew let maturity or bruising standards slip, a cold-chain gap between the orchard and the packhouse door that let respiration or moisture loss run ahead of schedule, or a grading change on your own line, a new grader running stricter or looser than the standard, which shows up as a packout move even though nothing changed in the field.

The distinction matters because the fix is different in each case. A grower-side drop needs a conversation with the grower. A cold-chain drop needs a look at transit times and reefer logs. A grading-side drop needs a recalibration of your own staff or equipment. Reading the trend without being able to isolate which of the three it is just produces a number nobody can act on.

Per-run versus per-day

Tracking packout per run, not just per day, is what makes the drop traceable to a cause in the first place. A day's packout is an average across every grower block, variety, and pick date that came through the packhouse that day, and averages hide exactly the outlier that matters. A single bad grower block can be buried inside a day-level number that still looks acceptable, while that grower's own trend, visible only at the run level, has been sliding for two weeks.

Per-day tracking still has a place: it is the number a plant manager wants for a quick end-of-shift read on overall line performance, and it is useful for spotting a plant-wide issue, a grading machine out of calibration, a labour shortage forcing rushed sorting, that would not show up as a single grower's problem. But per-day should sit on top of per-run data, not replace it. If your system only ever produces a daily average, you have already lost the ability to answer the one question a grower will eventually ask: what happened to my specific delivery.

What corrupts the number

Three inputs quietly wreck a packout figure, and none of them show up as an obvious error until someone goes looking. Unrecorded rework is the first: fruit that gets re-sorted, re-packed, or moved between cartons after the initial grading pass, without that movement being logged, either double-counts weight or drops it entirely depending on which side of the rework the record was taken. The second is mixed lots: two grower deliveries combined on the line before grading, common when a packhouse is short on bin space, means the resulting packout gets attributed to whichever lot's paperwork the packer happened to reference, and neither grower's number is then real. The third is tare errors: bin, pallet, or carton weights that are estimated rather than weighed, or a tare figure from one bin type applied to a different one. On a 730 kg lot, a 2 kg tare error per bin across a dozen bins is enough to move the reported packout by more than a full percentage point.

None of these are dramatic failures. They are small process gaps that compound, and the packout number is usually the first place they become visible, because it is the one figure that gets checked against something external: a grower's own scale, a buyer's received weight, a previous season's run. Treat a packout number that will not reconcile against one of those external checks as a data problem before treating it as a fruit-quality problem.

How packout links to grower payments and to waste

Packout is not just an internal efficiency metric. In most grower-supplier arrangements it is the number the payment calculation runs on, directly or indirectly: a grower paid on a per-kilogram-packed basis is paid on exactly the saleable output side of this formula, so a definition dispute or a tare error is not an abstract data-quality issue, it is money moving into or out of a grower's pocket on a number they cannot independently verify unless you show them the underlying lot records.

On the waste side, the gap between received weight and saleable weight is where shrink, grade-out, and write-off costs live. A packhouse that only reports the headline percentage without breaking out where the missing weight went, lower grade, processing diversion, or outright waste, cannot tell a grower or its own management whether a low packout is a value-capture problem, fruit sold at a discount instead of at full spec, or a genuine loss problem, fruit that generated no revenue at all. Those require completely different responses, and both get flattened into the same single number if the breakdown is not kept.

What to do with the number once you have it

The reliable way to track packout is to capture it at the moment of packing: record the input lots consumed and the graded output as it comes off the line, and let the number compute itself, rather than reconstructing it from receival dockets and dispatch notes at month end, by which point the specific rework, mixed-lot, or tare issue behind a bad run is impossible to reconstruct.

Fernable does this on any phone: each pack run shows live packout and ties the result back to the grower block, so a drop is visible the same day it happens instead of surfacing in a spreadsheet three weeks later when the grower has already asked why their payment looks low.