Dole Food Company, Inc. is the largest fresh vegetables, fruit and freshly cut high quality flowers producer and distributor in the world.  It started in 1850 as a pineapple production project in Hawaii, United States and currently distributes a growing range of packed food.

Dole Fresh Fruit International, Ltd., a subsidiary of Dole Food Company Inc. is a multinational company whose main activity is the production, sale and export of   fruit and vegetables as well as international cargo transport. It has businesses in 90 countries worldwide and controls operations for all Latin America and the Caribbean from Costa Rica. The company currently operates in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Equator and Dominican Republic, where it purchases and produces the fruit it subsequently sells in North America, Europe and Asia.

With the purpose of improving operations in the area of Food Safety, and complying with food safety regulatory agencies in the United States (FDA) and Europe (EFSA), it decided to develop a traceability system; that is to say, a system to allow the tracking of food products throughout the production and distribution stages.

For this purpose, the operative procedures supporting the tracking of the product from the production site to the shipping of the product were developed and modified, and the software to support all operative processes was developed.

The project started in 2001 and the first version of the application was developed in RPG on an AS/400. However, due to the new requirements established by the Corporation in Westlake, California, and the new FDA regulations against bioterrorism in the United States, the Latin America Traceability project was realigned and refocused to comply with the new requirements.

“Since we had very little time to develop the application and we were searching for a tool that would allow ‘migrating’ the application in the future to another platform in a relatively 'painless' process, and in view of the results obtained by our partners of Standard Fruit of Honduras with GeneXus, we decided to get trained in the use of the tool to develop the new application”, said Mario Fernández Dole's Senior Analyst/Programmer. 

The solution developed with GeneXus NET WEB on DB2/400 with ADO.NET access is operating with excellent performance with a centralized data repository and allows supplying information on dispatches from the farms to Dole's logistic system before the product reaches the port. Additionally, it provides detailed information (farm, packing plant, transport, technical product specifications, etc.) to the market and/or customer. 

Due to the fact that it operates as a data repository, it is used as data source for other Dole applications, such as: fruit purchase and settlement (for payments to independent producers), payment to transport companies, use of materials to download the carton inventory of the farm.

Additionally, because of the usefulness of GeneXus we also generated a “Stand Alone” (offline) version that uses SQL Server 2000 as DBMS. This version is used in areas (farms) where communication is poor, explained Fernández.

In this way, they developed a Traceability application that is available 24 hours a day with online or Stand Alone access from all Dole locations in Latin America and that allows responding any Dole customer query almost immediately.

The solution met the business objectives in the required time and had the support of CSI of Honduras and ARTech.