Online service helps find lost or missing fruit bins

Each growing season, growers, packers and shippers end up with stacks of plastic bins used to haul fruit from the field to the packinghouse that don't belong to them. After conducting inventory, they realize the cost to replace their own missing bins could be hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

An employee at LoBue Citrus Inc. in Lindsay recently started organizing bins that came in from citrus groves and, after many hours of research, realized that a number of them belonged to several other packers—including some that he could not locate. He has since used an online service, the California Farm Bureau Federation Bin Location Program, and completed reports about the bins he found in hopes of also finding missing LoBue bins in the process. The webpage for the service can be found at www.cfbf.com/bins.

"Returning bins to their owners is the ethically correct thing to do, which is something my company is absolutely in favor of," said Anthony Tolladay, a shipping clerk at LoBue Citrus, who added that quality control with the plastic field bins is important.

"We all have a common goal and that is to produce a good quality product and sell it. If the bins are damaged, they can damage the fruit, so that's a concern," he said.

Fruit packers, the Farm Bureau and Fresno County law enforcement officials discussed the challenges surrounding stolen and missing fruit bins in 2006, which led to a CFBF Bin Theft Survey that estimated theft losses that year at $726,000.

Danielle Oliver, CFBF director of rural crime prevention, said rural-crime detectives pointed out that one challenge with investigating bin thefts was the lack of a real inventory control system.

"Law enforcement had said the hardest part about investigating bin theft was when they call a grower and say, 'We found your bins,' then the grower says, 'Those are not my bins anymore; we sold those bins,'" Oliver said. "Farm Bureau developed the online reporting system for growers, packers and shippers to report missing and found bins that their fellow packers could access, to make sure property gets returned to its rightful owners."

It may be several months before Tolladay receives a final tally of LoBue's missing bins, but so far he estimated the company is short by about 300 bins. Replacing those with new bins could cost about $54,000.

"We got a lot of bins that came in from the fields that were inadvertently put on our trucks. Every single packinghouse we've talked to had the same thing happen, because we've had a lot of other companies bring back some of ours as well," Tolladay said.

Tolladay said he discovered 1,077 bins at LoBue belonging to about 132 different companies, including one bin that traveled to the Central Valley from Portland, Ore.

Some bin manufacturers offer the option of adding radio-frequency identification or RFID tags on the bins for product traceability and tracking, but Tolladay said has not seen those become a general practice yet.

Kyle Reynolds, a field superintendent at Del Monte Foods in Kingsburg, said the company uses bins for hauling peaches, apricots, grapes and zucchini.

"We were directly involved in that (2006) effort and I think people are now doing better keeping track of bins as a result," Reynolds said. "It definitely brought the issue into view and it brought some of the culprits into view—those who were grinding off names from the side of the bins and adding their own—so they knew somebody was watching."

Reynolds said bins used by Del Monte travel all over the state and because they are only used for two months out of the year, they are rented to other packers during the offseason.

"What happens with our industry is everybody is being squeezed and everybody is given more to do, and tracking bins is something that ends up getting left on the to-do list," Reynolds said. "The (CFBF Bin Location Program) website was a great idea and is something that we need to use again. There are more people using plastic bins and new people coming into the bin rental business."

(Christine Souza is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. She may be contacted at csouza@cfbf.com.)