Highlights

Becoming ISO 9001 certified helps us to better serve our clients

Fruitful Office has just become ISO-9001 certified. Hooray! It all sounds very technical (which it is really), but the key thing about ISO-9001 is that it is all about customers and improving the quality of their experience with us. So how does this certification help our customers when what we do is deliver fresh fruit to offices?

In more ways than one would think, it turns out. Fresh fruit is a natural and perishable good which means that its quality can vary tremendously from week to week. Fruit is at risk from the varying weather elements (sun, rain, wind, frost) whilst growing, the correct timing for the fruit-picking, and the handling of the fruit during sorting and transit from our suppliers. And if that was not enough, to make our life even more challenging each type of fruit ripens at different speeds and at different temperatures - Fruitful Office includes up to 20 different types of fruit in its seasonal fruit baskets throughout the year! Once we receive the fruit we have to ensure that it is kept, sorted and handled in the right way so that we are able to deliver our baskets at just the right level of ripeness for eating on the day.

Therefore, implementing robust and demanding quality management processes that meet ISO standards helps us serve our clients to a very high and consistent level - week-in week-out. Here are a few practical examples of this in action:Our buyer has strict requirements for each fruit variety he purchases and is able to trace the provenance of all fruit reaching each client on each delivery day

• Our full time Quality Assurance manager carries out strict quality checks of incoming fruit and the ripeness of existing fruit
• Our carefully trained packing team follows clear quality control checks for ‘accepting' or ‘rejecting' different fruit
• Every week we have a company Taste Panel where we all taste the fruit we are delivering to clients and provide scores on ‘taste', ‘appearance', and ‘ripeness'
• When we receive customer feedback we record it, assess it and then take steps to correct the issue internally
• Every year we perform a Customer Feedback Questionnaire across our entire client base to assess our service across all aspects

We could go on and on, but you get the picture. Providing a quality product and service is what our business was built on and we want to ensure we get better at it each year as we grow.