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An Innovator in Traceability: Hillside Gardens Ltd.

Ron Gleason, CEO and General Manager with Dan Vander Kooi, Plant Manager of Hillside Gardens Ltd.

Today, buyers and consumers want to know where their food comes from and that it is safe. Because Hillside Gardens manages their production from seed to storage to finished product, they can provide this assurance to all their customers. 

Hillside Gardens has been growing vegetables on the Holland Marsh north of Toronto for more than 40 years.  They have a well-deserved reputation for innovation, being one of the first operations in the area to automate production. They worked hard to expand their business and in the mid-70s, started packing their own produce. Today they market and distribute directly to large retail outlets as well as through brokers or distributors.

When Hillside was contacted about participating in a series of traceability pilot projects with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, they immediately agreed 

Traceability is a system designed to help collect, retain and share information about raw materials, production, as well as the finished products. More than 20 firms took part in the traceability project, including a honey producer, a winery and a cheese maker.

For Hillside Gardens, a traceability system made it possible to track all production inputs, such as fertilizer and seed, record information about all production, from harvest through packing, and share information with customers who received the finished product.

The company invested in software that could track every stage of the operation including field-by-field preparation and other operational tasks. Crop harvest and inventory management modules in the software track the produce from picking to storage. All packing and processing information is recorded using handheld computers called PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistant) with barcode readers, making it a simple task to select produce that is ready for shipping.

The electronic system provides many benefits for Hillside Gardens. “The man hours just in generating production reports at the end of the day used to be tremendous – you can imagine counting 6,000 bags of carrots by hand,” explains Ron Gleason, CEO and general manager “So we’ve saved a lot of time and also improved our inventory control because we now have real time data on what’s happening in the field with our hand held PDA’s. It’s helped reduce spoilage and waste and we’ve our improved our order-taking because we can easily access our inventory.“

“There is also value-added in the traceability system,” Gleason comments. “It gives us much better quality control right to the customers’ door so they can be assured that we’ve done our due diligence and are working hard to ensure food safety. It lends integrity to the company.”