VEGTRA Project Success: Revolutionizing Vegetable Purchasing for a Sustainable Future

We're thrilled to announce the successful finalization and validation of the VEGTRA project! This groundbreaking initiative has developed a dynamic scheduling system for vegetable purchasing that's set to transform the agricultural supply chain. After extensive validation, we're excited to share the remarkable results and the significant impact VEGTRA is already having.

What is VEGTRA?

The VEGTRA solution streamlines and optimizes the entire vegetable purchasing process, from farmer to food producer. We've developed a comprehensive system with features designed to enhance efficiency, transparency, and sustainability:

• Cooperative-Specific Scheduling: The system allows for scheduling purchases for multiple farmer cooperatives, with each cooperative having secure access only to their own farmers' data (names, phone numbers, purchase amounts, vegetable types, and prices).

• Centralized Oversight: The purchasing organization (food producer/processor) gains a holistic view with access to data from all participating cooperatives and farmers.

• Flexible Schedule Management: Schedules can be updated automatically or manually by representatives from either the cooperative or the producer/processor, ensuring adaptability to changing needs.

• User-Friendly Interface: We prioritized ease of use, making schedule creation and updates intuitive for all users.

• Efficient Collection Point Operations: A clear queue of scheduled purchases is displayed on a terminal at the vegetable collection point. The process is quick and simple: operators confirm farmer arrivals, add truck details (registration, semi-trailers), and log vegetable sort and quality.

• Automated Weight Collection: The solution integrates directly with scales, automatically collecting weight data. This significantly minimizes the risk of errors and fraud.

• Instant Documentation: Purchase confirmation documents are automatically generated and can be printed on the spot or sent via email.

• Real-Time Reporting: Administrative staff have access to near real-time reports on collected amounts, boosting operational efficiency.

• Farmer Notifications: Farmers receive timely SMS notifications about any schedule changes within a pre-defined range, keeping them informed and reducing uncertainty.

  
  

Tangible Results from Our Validation

The validation of the VEGTRA solution with Polish food producer - ZPOW Kotlin demonstrated a dramatic improvement in vegetable purchasing. We observed:

• A staggering decrease in average farmer waiting time during peak season, from 86 minutes down to just 12 minutes.

• A significant reduction in overall purchase time, dropping from 70 minutes to 44 minutes.

These time savings have led to a substantial benefit: a 50% reduction in food waste caused by inefficient purchase procedures.

Beyond these impressive numbers, the producer experienced other key advantages:

• Elimination of data failures related to purchased vegetable mass.

• Valuable new information on quality issues, directly aiding production planning.

• Improved efficiency for administrative workers due to instant report availability.

From the perspective of farmer cooperatives, the scheduling process became well-organized, and many previous issues related to schedule changes simply disappeared.

Driving Towards a Sustainable Future

The VEGTRA project is a testament to our commitment to sustainability, delivering across all three pillars:

• Environmental: We've achieved a significant reduction in food waste, are contributing to lowering carbon emissions from transportation, and are optimizing resource use in vegetable farming.

• Economic: By shortening vegetable purchase cycle times and reducing farmer waiting times, VEGTRA leads to substantial cost savings and improved profitability for both producers and farmers.

• Social: The solution has enhanced working conditions for local farmers, facilitated digital upskilling for Kotlin employees and farmers' cooperative representatives, and ultimately resulted in increased farmer satisfaction with the purchase process.

The success of the VEGTRA project marks a pivotal moment in agricultural innovation. We are now actively preparing the VEGTRA solution for commercialization, eager to bring these benefits to a wider audience.

The project VEGTRA has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the GA 101058613. This publication reflects only MASTA's view. The European Commission is not liable for any use that may be made of the information therein.