Increasingly, we are seeing a growing pressure on compliance requirements as our avocado industry advances. At AAL, we have come a long way from seeing compliance as an issue.

We now embrace some of the structured approach compliance adherence can bring. We apply it to enhance the quality of the fruit we provide, and the services we provide. Compliance has helped us move forward on consistency of our service, consistency in our training and in our people management.

We are better communicators with our clients, our market and our fruit marketers.

We have better plans both short and long term for growing our fruit, and as a result we can give our property owners better outlooks of their future avocado orcharding.

We are better planned so we can better deliver on time to a more consistent standard.

We have used our health and safety compliance processes to enhance the quality of our training, and quality of our services. Our food safety programme, which is central to our compliance and our service standards, has enhanced our ability to better understand our business. Similarly GAP has been great for our orcharding.

Taking the time to document review and update regularly provides us with a better outlook.

Compliance can be challenging on smaller blocks and we have been able to grab that bunch up from a number of small blocks into a single system and improve their individual performance as a collective.

In short, I support grabbing the opportunity to change, taking it to enhance the business and grabbing the opportunity to take the best you can from it.

As an example, recently we introduced electronic data capture out in the field. This was challenging for many of our staff. We took a hands-on individual approach. The staff appreciate the opportunity to enhance and simplify their work and the result is while they have a change in their recording activity, they now record less data than previously. The result is our staff are now driving this wider within our business and providing feedback for further improvements.

So I say during these late-winter wet colder months, get that planning, reviewing and updating done.   Spend the time learning how to apply the latest technology and services to your business, and review that in the long term. The short term pain of change is worthwhile.