Some of the best ideas originate from the rank and file. You know, the men and women who aren’t necessarily in charge, who have aching backs from systematically lifting heavy cases and breaking down produce loads.
A produce buyer-turned-inspector buddy of mine once said, “Just because I wear jeans and a cooler jacket now doesn’t mean my IQ dropped. I ditched the slacks and tie because I wanted to.”
Indeed. Some of the best ideas in an organization sprout from those already surrounding you. Consider early in World War II, Capt. Charles Ross Greening was one of the 1942 famed Doolittle Raiders.
The mission called for the B-25 pilots to approach at an altitude too low to use the state-of-the-art, $10,000 Norden bombsight. Greening assembled a makeshift sight, using 20 cents of scrap metal (dubbed the “Mark Twain bombsight”), which performed quite accurately.
Or consider that after the 1944 D-Day landing in Normandy, American troops had trouble navigating through dense hedgerows in the French countryside. A little ingenuity, attributed to Sgt. Curtis Cullin, provided the answer.
He welded together metal scraps as prongs on the front of a Stuart Light Tank. Dubbed “The Rhino” device, his improvised bulldozer neatly cut through the hedgerow’s berm and brush and the invention was instantly adopted for widespread use.
No dragged-out engineering. No stalls in research and development. Just creative ideas from the rank and file.
Challenges in the produce aisle abound as well. If you wait for ideas to flow downhill from some distant home office to solve all your problems, you may be in for a long wait.
Related: More insight from Armand Lobato
Take for example my old friend Rick Gonzales. He was a produce buyer but also an accomplished IT trainer. He developed a “patch” computer program for us to use on normally extended pricing days that cut our usual time in half and saved our bacon.
Going back further, my old supervisor pals Ken Chrisco and Ron Anderson and I did a breakneck run of overnight produce resets in the mid ’80s, trying multiple table configurations and sometimes unorthodox merchandising ideas to help ward off a new competitor who threatened our market share. Having been turned loose to try just about anything, we reset half of our 66-store chain over a six-month period — all with the most meager of budget.
So, we made do with whatever was at hand. We used a lot of shipper cartons, wirebound crates, pallets, burlap, milk wires, bins, bushel baskets and any prop we could dig out of storage lofts in the stores to jazz up the produce merchandising.
We also improvised a step further with homemade sprinkler systems. Instead of spending thousands on the early misting systems available at the time, we scraped together drip-irrigation parts and timers from nearby garden centers and installed these in our reset wet racks. They weren’t much to look at, but they were real labor-savers. I can’t say whose idea it was to rig this up, but the cost was under $100. The misters worked great.
Many ideas were gleaned from the rank and file. Enough of them worked to the point that we paid close attention whenever someone said, “Hey, how about we try this …”
Upper management in every industry has problems, and it behooves them to seek solutions from those on the front line, so to speak.
Finally, there’s an old business parable called “Think outside the (Toothpaste) box!” In a nutshell, a toothpaste factory hired an engineering firm to solve the problem of shipping too many empty toothpaste boxes, creating shortages and credit issues.
In time, the engineering firm produced an expensive, high-tech scale that would identify empty boxes, trigger an alarm, which created a process for an employee to stop everything, remove the empty box and restart the line. After weeks of using the fancy quality control system, the defects eventually — and oddly enough — dropped to zero.
The CEO investigated and observed that just ahead of the new multimillion-dollar system sat a $20 fan blowing any empty boxes off the belt and into a bin. He asked a supervisor about the fan. The supervisor said, “Oh, that. The kid at that workstation put it there because he was tired of getting up to remove the empty boxes and restarting the line every time the alarm sounded.”
They should have asked the kid for advice to begin with.
“The more time I spend with our people, the more I find out about our business.” — Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines
Armand Lobato works for the Idaho Potato Commission. His 40 years of experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions.