Loading Out Fruits and Vegetables in Wholesale Warehouses

Excerpts from the report: Service wholesalers of fresh fruits and vegetables accept customers' orders through their salesmen and make deliveries to retail food stores. The wholesalers operate in warehouses where they receive commodities in carload quantities and place them in storage. Every afternoon and evening of each business day, they organize and execute the activities associated with removing the commodities from storage and placing them in trucks for delivery. The "loading out" phase of the materials handling operations performed in the service wholesaler's warehouse is the subject of this report. A number of different types of materials handling equipment are used to move fresh fruits and vegetables through the warehouses of service wholesalers. Agricultural Marketing Service researchers worked directly with a number of these wholesalers to obtain accurate data on the methods and equipment used in the industry, under actual working conditions. Industrial engineering techniques were used to collect and analyze data so that the comparisons made here are on a truly comparable basis. In a large majority of cases the operations studied were performed at a high level of productivity. Attention will be called to those few instances where this was not true.