Testimonials

The decision support tools provided by Delytics have added significant value to Zespri International Limited by helping growers in multiple countries predict the right time to pick their Gold kiwifruit, according to Dr David Tanner, former General Manager of Science and Innovation at Zespri. By making it easy for growers to predict the best time to harvest, the decision support tools are helping the world’s largest marketer of kiwifruit to service markets early and maintain a consistent quality for their high value Gold crop.

Hear what Zespri has to say...

(This video refers to our Managing Director, Mark Loeffen, and the late Dr Bob Jordan, who was a valued Delytics team member for many years).

The Delytics team’s crop quality expertise and ability to analyse complex data helped Citrus Australia identify the maturity measures for their recently adopted Australian Citrus Quality Standards. The new standards were introduced in 2014 to assist Australian citrus growers, packers, marketers and retailers deliver quality citrus that consumers will enjoy eating and want to repeat purchase. Before setting the standards, Citrus Australia had to first determine the maturity parameters for oranges and mandarins that would consistently meet consumer preferences for juiciness and taste.

A new fruit quality maturity standard recommended by Delytics has helped boost the consumer acceptability of New Zealand navel oranges from 62% to 93% in just one season.

Mark Loeffen helped us develop a clear and concise project plan for a technically challenging high temperature casing condition diagnostic system for the geothermal energy industry. Mark’s training support helped us focus on the commercial aspects of our project right from the start and we now have a new product that is eagerly anticipated by commercial clients, even before it is launched.

Delytics added huge value to our industry by transforming the raw monitoring data into easy-to-read graphics that highlighted immaturity over a four-month period of harvest. Their analytical skills gave us the tangible evidence we’d been looking for, for 10 years, to help us decide the evidence-based minimum standards needed for growers to harvest their fruit at the optimum maturity. We want our grapes to provide a consistently good eating experience, throughout the whole season.

The increased consumer demand already achieved by this project supports previous research showing that consumers will buy more fruit when they are confident it will taste good.

From an export point of view, importers will always pay a high price for good quality mature fruit. Table grapes are now the largest exporter by value of all fresh fruit out of Australia. Over the past 12 months our export sales have gone from $555 million to almost $650 million.

Mark Loeffen added huge value to a large meat research project I led. It was a very complex multi-disciplinary project with lots of moving parts, involving both very applied and theoretical scientists The significant technical expertise, project management support and coaching Mark provided over the full five years of the project helped us deliver our project objectives. Mark is very experienced in managing R&D projects and is very good at bringing in a cross-pollination of ideas between sectors. Working with Mark helped me grow my skills as a programme leader and develop robust systems and work plans to meet the needs of stakeholders and ensure good on-time delivery within budget. Mark is really good to work with. He is a good communicator, very responsive and engaged, and proactive in keeping things moving. He’s got a good way of bringing people together for common goals and is well able to navigate the tension that sometimes arises between the objectives of the academic collaborators and those more interested in commercial outcomes. It was a very valuable investment having Mark involved in this project. He has saved us time and money and helped us develop new meat quality measurement technology that has been successfully commercially trialled in a meat plant.

Mark Loeffen researched and prepared a technical review (white paper) for us to document the techniques that had been tested for shearing the wool of live lambs. Our ultimate objective, which we have since achieved, was to improve animal welfare by developing a new line shearing process to remove the wool from the animals after they are slaughtered. Mark's report provided a solid starting point to help us develop the new process by showing us what had already been done and what had not been done. We engaged Mark to carry out the technical review as he was a recognised world expert in this field. We found him to be very knowledgeable and a very good person to work with. If he says he will do something he will do it and you know he will always perform a very good job.