We are looking to implement tracking and coding system for mangoes in our Society. We wish to request you for ideas on doing this and we would be happy to look at ready products and systems in this.
Background and reasons for this need.
We are the largest co-operative society of Alphonso mango growers in India, with 700 members and now entering 25th year of operations this year. We help our farmer members with fertilisers, pesticides, equipment, knowledge etc round the year, and also buy their mangoes on cash and help them market it. Last year we started our online marketing initiativewww.devgadmango.com, which became a hit. We promised and fulfilled our promise of the best Alphonso mango, and since then we are seeing increasing registrations with us. We are looking coding and tracking system for the following needs…
1. Improve management of mango supplies
2. Some times mangoes go rotten from inside though they look perfect from outside and pass all checks. Currently there is no technology to look inside mangoes like you have for oranges. So we want to go by the common sense way; find a pattern in all bad mango reports and figure out if there is something wrong in the tree.
3. We also want to gamify the mango eating experience on the lines of www.wheresgeorge.com or www.whereswilly.com. The idea is whether we can take users down to the tree which gave birth to the mango they are eating, on Google Maps. Not sure of how interesting or engaging this can be for customers, but we thought it’d be fun. Any suggestions welcome.
4. We also want to have the codes integrated with FB and Twitter. Can there be a technology whereby the users just scan the code and can post a status like ‘I just relished a mango that grew at ……’ with its GPS co-ordinates.
We also want the system to be easy to implement. In the mango collection process currently, our members get their mangoes to our centre in Devgad. A team of graders sift through the mangoes individually checking each of the mangoes. They are graded after selection and the members paid for the final quantity of the mangoes selected and their sizes. Thereafter, the mangoes are taken to our hay bed stacks where they are wrapped in paper and dry grass and kept for ripening. Here they get mixed with mangoes from other farmers, and since there is no coding-tracking system, if a mango is reported bad, we cannot track back which farmer and which tree it came from. So if this system is implemented, it should be easy for our staff to use. Not sure if the codes should be printed on the fruits or printed on stickers that could be stuck on the fruits.
Please suggest what more can we do with this tracking and coding and also please share your ideas of how can we do this tracking?
