Any produce workers out there

General Questions
#1

My family is into the produce bussiness and we have a retail and a wholesale bussiness. I have a question for anyone else who works in produce (not talking about a little corner or a big store but someone who has been working in wholesale produce or even in the retail bussiness for a while). At my store we get our produce in in fairly big quantities and the one thing that has always bothered me has been lemon boxes. Anyone who works with boxes know that occasianlly you’ll be carring a box around and the bottom will break out and you’ll have fruit all over the place but it seem that with lemon boxes almost 1/2 of them have broken bottoms which makes them vary hard to move around. I’ve never had this problem with any other fruit though. Any ideas.

Formerly known as Nec3f on the AOL SDMB

#2

Don’t work in the produce business, but worked in thw box business a loooong time. Designed a lot of produce boxes. ( sorry Corrugated Container business)
How does this sound to you? For their size, lemons are heavy,being mostly juice.So lots of PPS (pounds per square inch). Also being juicy some get smushed. The juice weakens the box, we used wax and plastic coatings but it wears off, the weight of all the lemons is concentrated on the bottom ones, afew lemons burst thru weakening the box and allowing juice to spread , and afore ya know it lemon squash.

#3

From what I have noticed, none of the boxes are really dameged or wet (like most other boxes that break) but it seems more like they didn’t use enough glue or something. When we get, say, 50 boxes of lemons in usually half of them are upside down because the bottom is broken and quite a few also have broken tops. Also I’ve never notcied any fruit boxes that have been waxed just veggies that get top iced.

Formerly known as Nec3f on the AOL SDMB

#4

OK are the lemons coming from the same packers as the rest of your stuff? Not same wholesaler, the original packer? Even if they are who made the boxes? Same converter as the others? Since you mentioned the possible skimpy glue that may be possible.Look in that circle some where on the box it will give the specs for that box (maybe it’s just a wimpy box) and who made it.
It is just subjective on my part, but it still seems that lemons are the densest produce, proportionally heavier for there size than any thing else. So it just may be that they are natural box busters. How well do the limes survive? They don’t seem to be as dense.

#5

Are limes come in 40lb boxes and we don’t seem to have to much of a prob with them. And as far as who packed the lemons or who made the box I’m not sure but I’ve seen the problem as long as I can remember and surely every box of lemons we’ve gotten isn’t from the same people

Formerly known as Nec3f on the AOL SDMB

#6

OK i’ll just stand by my ‘dense lemon’ theory 'till some one comes up with something better. Wonder if there is any corelation with bad cars? See the 1st used car salesman used to be in the produce bizz and…oh never mind.