We are pleased to be highlighting Rice Fruit Company in our latest customer spotlight series. Rice Fruit is heading into their 5th year with Croptracker and their second year as a Croptracker RnD partner. Through this partnership, Rice Fruit benefits from access to Croptracker’s full functionality while offering valuable feedback on new modules and features to help refine and enhance the system. For this article we spoke with three key members of Rice Fruit’s team, Leighton Rice, Maggie Travis and Mike Tully.
Located in Gardners Pennsylvania, Rice Fruit has been a family run business since its founding by Arthur Rice in 1913. Rice Fruit Company was established, and its first packhouse built, after more than a century of the Rice family growing apples in Adams County. Now Rice Fruit Company packs and sells quality apples all over the world from more than 40 regional growers. The 4th generation of the Rice family has now entered the leadership of the company and works closely together to manage operations. Leighton Rice heads up the Quality Control department, ensuring only the best fruit is packed and sold under the Rice family brand.
As Quality Control Manager, Leighton leads the receiving process. When fruit from Rice’s own orchards and from outside growers arrives for packing, Leighton’s team assesses the fruit for storage quality and packing potential. Since 2021, Leighton has been using Croptracker’s Harvest Quality Vision (HQV) to assess the size and color of fruit at receiving. Each lot of fruit sent to Rice is scanned, resulting in a sized sample of approximately 100 apples in seconds. In the app, bin tags are scanned into the Lot Code field of the HQV event, creating a seamless and accurate link between Croptracker data and Rice Fruit’s existing inventory system. Leighton is able to analyze the size in both carton count estimations, in mm’s, or fractions of an inch band sizes.
Having the option to review direct size data ensures that Leighton is able to get an accurate idea of the pack-out potential of each lot, regardless of variety. Rice Fruit uses a ‘size for size’ measurement system, eliminates the need to create different size classes for each variety and simplifies the process of estimating pack weights. Using this information, Leighton is able to accurately assess the size of the fruit before it heads to storage. He can then make informed decisions about which lots to group and pack together to fulfill orders most efficiently from storage throughout the year.
Heading into the 2023 harvest season, the Rice Fruit team reached out about adding the option to capture additional quality information at receiving and decided to add Croptracker’s Quality Control (QC) module. Leighton and Mike worked with Croptracker’s support team to develop two simple templates for their receiving team to fill in on the app, effectively digitizing their intake QC processes and incorporating it into their HQV workflow. Mike Tully explains how the Quality Control module streamlined their processes:
Previously, if the auditors saw a defect, they needed to write it down and bring it to their workstation for data entry later. (The QC module) is flexible enough that we were able to mirror the entry form they were already accustomed to and add it right to Harvest Quality Vision.
In the spring of 2024, Rice Fruit became an RnD growing partner with Croptracker and expanded their account use with more users, modules and data connectivity. This partnership also grants Rice Fruit access to beta features for testing and feedback. Maggie Travis, the Grower Services Manager, became one of the first users of our Crop Load Vision (CLV) system in the region. CLV is used to help growers assess fruit yields prior to harvest. In real-time, it counts and sizes fruit in the tree using just an iPhone. In the 2025 season, Rice Fruit plans on expanding their use of Crop Load Vision to boost their Crop yield estimation accuracy heading to harvest.
I really liked having the ability to capture the size throughout the growing season. (…) I’m curious to see how the growth curves will compare year over year, and what we can learn about potential size development for the harvest. That will be really interesting to see.
Maggie’s feedback during her initial testing led to some in-season adjustments of the tool by the Croptracker team. To speed up the growing location selection process while in the orchard, we added a feature to allow for QR code scanning to auto-select the location. When choosing from a long list of external growers, this makes the process easier and less error-prone. Thanks to Maggie’s feedback, Croptracker added an option to set a default scan percentage, eliminating the need for adjustments after every tree scan. When scanning trees in the same block, of the same size and growing style, the percentage of the tree scanned can be assumed to be the same, making the total count estimate easier and more accurate.
In 2024, Rice also adopted the Starch Quality Vision (SQV) module, using it both in the orchard to time harvests and at receiving for post-harvest analysis. SQV scores iodined apples using only a picture and returns a score using the Cornell SPI. Maggie led the project of starch sampling in the orchard to fine tune harvest timing and Leighton adopted SQV at receiving, using it to sample every incoming lot for storage decision making support.
I was resistant at first. Adding any kind of step (at receiving) seems like a lot, but actually it’s not adding anything, it’s maybe making it faster. (...) It takes out subjectivity obviously. Just having it standardized is great too because it is consistently relative to the other scores. Consistency is just as important as accuracy.
Leighton was quick to highlight the main strengths of the tool: that it creates a sharable and organized record of the starch sample, and that it is consistent in its scoring. Using SQV’s computer vision tech helps eliminate inconsistencies in scoring between different assessors. It is very easy for even a single experienced person assessing starch tests to introduce inconsistencies when scoring many samples a day.
When we were setting it up, I had only used it one time, and I scored the sample myself and then I ran it with SQV and it was the same score down to the decimal so I was sold.
Rice Fruit Company also takes great advantage of Croptracker’s API connection to link all data gathered using the app with their in house ERP system and other inventory and storage room data. Mike Tully has built a connection that will pull all HQV, QC and SQV data from Croptracker together with their inventory storage location data. This has helped Rice Fruit adopt processes without disrupting their existing workflows and avoiding adding multiple locations for data analysis. The sales team at Rice Fruit is able to access vital QC data in the ERP system they are already familiar with. Mike has taken great advantage of the accurate QR code data links that Leighton and Maggie use to associate Croptracker data to inventory ensuring that there are no mismatches.
Moving forward to next season, our staff is looking forward to supporting Rice Fruit in adopting more of Croptracker into their workflow. Rice plans to use CLV more next season and Croptracker is excited to help ensure we have the reporting capabilities to meet their goals in accurate crop yield estimation. Additionally, we hope to explore gathering more data, sooner during the harvest season, by introducing HQV size sampling and digital QC inspections in the orchard. This can allow for more sampling to be done without the time and space limitations of a receiving area.
Rice Fruit Company exemplifies how technology and tradition can come together to drive innovation in agriculture. Through their partnership with Croptracker, Rice Fruit has seamlessly integrated advanced tools like Harvest Quality Vision, Quality Control, Crop Load Vision, and Starch Quality Vision into their operations, ensuring efficiency, accuracy, and consistency at every step. By leveraging these cutting-edge solutions, Rice Fruit continues to honor its rich legacy while setting new standards for quality in the industry.
As we look to the future, Croptracker is committed to supporting Rice Fruit’s evolving needs, enhancing their workflows, and helping them achieve their goals in yield estimation, quality control, and beyond. It has been a pleasure working with Mike, Maggie and Leighton and we’re excited to continue this collaborative journey and to see how Rice Fruit Company inspires innovation across the broader agricultural community.
