<b>2011 Profit Quest:</b> Tracking carts will help keep supplies in line

Collapsible carts disappear easily from Garden City Growers’ customer sites. A tracking system is designed to reduce the loss.Shipping carts are a major expense for Garden City Growers Inc. in Ontario, Canada. The company estimates it loses about 5 percent of these carts — about 150 units — every year.

At $200-$250 each, this is a major annual expense. In 2011, the company hopes to reduce the number of lost carts with a bar-code system and software written in house.

“We use a lot of carts and we’ve started bar coding them so we can track them everywhere they go,” said Garden City Growers president Ted VanderKaay. “But just because we’re tracking them doesn’t mean we’re getting 100 percent of them back. We scan them. We know where we drop them. What happens to them once they’re there, we can’t control.”

VanderKaay doesn’t think his customers are maliciously stealing the carts. Some just don’t have good locations for storing them. He said it would be easy to collapse these carts, throw them into a pick-up truck in the middle of the night, and sell them at recycling centers for cash.

And even though Garden City Growers’ name is clearly marked on the carts, he knows they’re occasionally picked up by other growers.

With the bar-code system, VanderKaay hopes to track regular offenders where carts most often end up missing. The company can then investigate why carts are vanishing from these sites, or arrange for drivers to return to pick up these carts sooner.

“We want to get back to these locations as soon as possible, but we’re not going to send a driver 200 miles out of his way just to pick up some carts,” VanderKaay said.

For more: Garden City Growers Inc., (905) 685-1120, http://gardencitygrowers.com.

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Specifics:
Name: Garden City Growers Inc.
Location: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
Founded: 1970s by the VanderKaay family, which had emigrated from Holland.

Production space: More than 500,000 square feet.
Crops: Annuals, pot plants, hanging basket and seasonal items.
Customer base: Independent and mass-market retailers in the United States, and Ontario and Quebec, Canada.
 

Quotable:
“It’s a reality of life. Carts go missing. Even if we had RFID tags with GPS tracking, I don’t think we’d be able to get them all back,” – Ted VanderKaay