SunAmerica Imports LLC is currently the first melon shipper from Central America to utilize HarvestMark® for its imported cantaloupes and honeydew melons. As of this current shipping season, which began in December 2011, SunAmerica’s melons from Guatemala have arrived with the HarvestMark® sticker.
“In this day and age, and especially with melons, we want to demonstrate to our retail customers our commitment to food safety and give them the highest assurance possible,” says Drew Kislin, Managing Director of SunAmerica Imports in Pompano Beach, FL. “We’ve invested a great deal of time, energy and expense into food safety and quality assurance.”
While HarvestMark® is currently in use only on melons from Guatemala, the company has implemented significant food safety steps with all its growers. “We have employed our own independent food safety company to implement and monitor our food safety protocols with our melon growers in every country we ship from,” reports Kislin. “This is on top of what Primus and other third party auditors are doing with those same farms. We also have our own quality control team in Central America headed by an industry veteran. We plan to expand the availability of HarvestMark® for other production areas soon.”
Sun America’s HarvestMark® program is especially valuable in light of the recently published FDA Interim Final Rule expanding the scope of the records FDA can request from a grower, shipper or retailer. “This interim rule encompasses a host of requirements,” explains Kislin. “For example, information must be provided within 24 hours from the time of an official request, and the FDA must be able to identify the immediate previous sources (one-back) and immediate subsequent recipients of food (one-up) based on your records. The HarvestMark® solution allows us and our customers to comply with these new requirements.”
Sun America Imports LLC handles melons and tropicals from farms in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, and Peru. “Our industry veterans represent 50 plus years of experience in the business,” says Kislin. “We’ve started the season with product through three ports: Fort Lauderdale/Miami, Houston and Wilmington. In our second cycle, we’ll be adding the port of Hueneme in Southern California. Our program joint ventures with growers and vertically integrates from the field to the end user. We have had positive feedback from retailers about our HarvestMark® program and they have asked us to expand it to other items.”
HarvestMark® is the industry-leading fresh food traceability platform from YottaMark, Inc. To date, more than 3.8 billion packages of fresh food have been enabled with HarvestMark® traceability, from the produce aisle to the meat case. Designed for a wide range of fresh products, the HarvestMark® platform supports industry standard case- and pallet-level traceability.
Source: HarvestMark®
