PROJECT
INCORPORATING COLD CHAIN
Inside the chiller plant room during the site visit. From left: Steven Palvi Jr, Carlo van Wyk, Baring Richardson, and Barend Koorts.
To protect quality, they try to only touch a mushroom once— when being harvested. Pickers are highly specialised and trained people, making sure that mushrooms are picked carefully and at great speed. Punnets are placed into trays and taken to the pack house immediately for final quality grading and packing.
Although the electricity bill was lower at the old site, there were the added costs of boiler fuel tray sterilisation.
7. PACKING AND DELIVERY Mushrooms are delivered to the pack houses and then await final quality and weight checking. Punnets are wrapped, labelled, given a sell-by date, placed into lugs, and stored in a large refrigerator, awaiting delivery.
As mushrooms have a very short shelf life, they are stored for the minimum amount of time. This means that Medallion’ s processes are designed to get mushrooms to end-users as soon as possible.
On order from customers, mushrooms are placed in refrigerated vehicles and delivered to the retailer’ s central distribution area or direct to the store.
8. END OF CROP AND COMPOST DISPOSAL A mushroom compost will deliver three weeks of mushrooms. Thereafter, most of the food has been used from the compost. Mushroom growing houses are then steamed out to ensure any mushroom diseases are killed and that a clean waste product is available to be disposed of.
Spent mushroom compost is then sold by our farms under contract to nurseries,
Packaged and cooled mushrooms, ready for distribution
16 www. coldlinkafrica. co. za COLD LINK AFRICA • May 2018