Driscoll's berries

© 2016 Bloomberg Finance LP

When Sankar Chinnathambi joined Driscoll’s more than eight years ago, he didn’t expect that four fruits could present such staggering operational complexity. As Chief Information Officer of the world’s largest berry company, a business shipping four billion clamshells annually across 60 countries, he has spent the better part of a decade transforming how technology sustains one of the most perishable supply chains on earth.

"A berry is perishable, and its shelf life is very [short]," Chinnathambi noted. "We need a lot of technology to make sure that it can go from our harvest to the consumers in a timely manner."

A Race Against the Clock

The numbers make the stakes plain. Driscoll's controls roughly one-third of the US berry market and grows strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries across more than 30 regions worldwide. And once a berry is picked, the clock starts. Raspberries, the most delicate of the four, have a shelf life of just 10 days.

To manage that window, Driscoll's operates by what Chinnathambi calls the 2-2-2 rule: within two hours of harvest, berries must be cooled to two degrees centigrade, a process that itself takes two hours. Temperature probes are embedded in the fruit throughout the journey, from cooling tunnel to forward distribution center to the customer's store. A strawberry harvested in Michoacán, Mexico, destined for a grocery shelf in Boston in December, travels five to six days before a consumer reaches for it. Every degree matters.

When Disruption Strikes

"Without the data, we are not able to provide visibility to our teams," Chinnathambi explained. "They can’t make those decisions faster."

When disruptions hit, that visibility becomes decisive. A recent flood in Morocco temporarily closed the Strait of Gibraltar, leaving raspberry-filled trucks stranded at the port. Rather than watching the berries deteriorate, Driscoll's used real-time temperature data to assess viability and redirect shipments to processing facilities or terminal markets, preserving value that would otherwise have been lost entirely.

Three Priorities, One Digital Backbone

Chinnathambi organizes the company's technology investments around three outcomes: growth, sustainability and resilience. The digital backbone supporting all three is Oracle Fusion ERP, being deployed globally to standardize operations across Driscoll's network of growers and markets.

On top of that foundation, the team is building three AI-driven capabilities. The first is a digital agronomist. With growers spread across more than 30 markets, Driscoll's cannot station human agronomists everywhere they are needed. An AI-powered tool lets growers scan diseased plants with a camera, identify the pest and receive guidance on which pesticides can legally be applied in that specific export market, a critical distinction given that food safety regulations vary sharply by country.

"We cannot have a clone of our agronomist in all the places," Chinnathambi observed. "How can we provide a digital agronomist for the growers?"

The second initiative targets supply forecasting. Traditionally, experienced field hands walked strawberry rows and estimated yields by counting flowers and green fruit. That craft is disappearing as the workforce shifts. AI models now ingest weather data, variety information and field sensor readings to generate the projections that human estimators once produced by eye. The third application is pricing optimization, helping Driscoll's determine the best price to offer customers, which in turn determines what growers are paid through the company's profit-sharing model.

BerryGPT and the R&D Frontier

Internally, Driscoll's launched BerryGPT, a company-specific AI platform that gives employees access to proprietary knowledge rather than general internet sources. Where a generic AI might offer broad guidance on strawberry cultivation, BerryGPT can advise on the optimal variety for a specific growing location based on Driscoll's own data.

The longer arc of investment points toward R&D. Developing a new berry variety is a seven-year process, combining parent plants and selecting offspring for flavor, disease resistance and regional suitability. Chinnathambi's team is exploring whether technology can compress that cycle to five years. Consumer taste data shapes that work, too. European consumers, he remarked, favor strawberries with a faint peachy note, a preference that directly influences which varieties Driscoll's develops for that market.

The Human Element

Over 95% of berries are still harvested by human hands, a figure that underscores how irreplaceable that labor remains. Technology, in Chinnathambi's framing, is not a replacement but an amplifier, giving growers better tools, giving forecasters better data and giving Driscoll's the visibility needed to deliver a fragile, time-sensitive product from a field in Morocco or Mexico to a grocery shelf, fresh enough to earn a second purchase.

"Our goal," Chinnathambi said, "is that when consumers eat our berries, they should look forward to buying the second clamshell."

Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on X @PeterAHigh.