A new customer of ours, Beta Spuds, which is one of Western Australia’s largest potato suppliers, recently made a large investment to improve production reliability by purchasing nine new Toyota forklifts: seven 32-8FG20 and two 32-8FG30.
This was Beta Spuds’ first move away from a rental model after 27 years of business.
Equipment reliability is important for all businesses but particularly so for Beta Spuds, given that it prides itself on a rapid production and delivery turnaround to ensure only the freshest potatoes are for sale. Impressively, it can take potatoes out of the ground, process them and have them in-store in under 12 hours. That’s fresh!
So reliability was top-of-mind for Beta Spuds when it came to considering new forklifts. They wanted equipment that they could rely on performing consistently, without downtime, and they eventually chose us.
During their due diligence process, Beta Spuds discovered a truism: that price doesn’t necessarily equate to value.
Beta Spuds was initially price-focused but later determined that the lifecycle and retained value of Toyota forklifts ultimately provided a better payback than a cheaper forklift that comes without a proven reputation for quality, safety and reliability.
Given this was the first time they had purchased forklifts outright, Beta Spuds realised that the reliability and longevity of our forklifts was going to be a big factor in their return-on-investment.
There were a lot of forklifts in the purchase so it was a big investment for them and they needed to make sure they were going to get the best value out of our forklifts over their lifecycle.
They also wanted to know that if they were going to keep them for a long duration that they would still be able to recoup some of their investment in the form of resale value.
And because they were so keen to avoid their new forklifts breaking down, they requested a strict servicing regime as insurance again against suffering any further down-time. With this in place, Beta Spuds can be certain Toyota forklifts aren’t going to let them down.
Mr Cocciolone said Toyota forklifts’ reputation was another factor in their investment, which was a large one for the business.
It was a big step for the business, having never adopted an outright-purchase model before and they were at pains to mitigate any risk in buying our forklifts up-front. Luckily for us, Toyota’s reputation for forklifts that stand the test of time helped reassure Beta Spuds and they proceeded with their purchases.
Beta Spuds has a long history of innovating with technology designed to streamline the process of delivering fresh potatoes as quickly and efficiently as possible, having introduced the first-ever wash-packer with vibrating screen-sizer to Western Australia in 1996, and in the following year the first WA company in the potato industry to be quality-assured SQF2000. Also, in 2010, it became WA’s first and then only four-stage washing process with a hydro-cooler.
It’s unsurprising, then, that the business capitalised on the opportunity to provide all its new forklifts with Toyota’s I_Site telematics system, which helps fleet and logistic managers to understand vehicle status, driver performance and overall productivity in their material handling operations.
The I_Site system dovetailed perfectly with Beta Spuds’ technological ideology, making sense because they wanted to have better visibility of their operations and they knew the data-capture and the visibility of what the forklifts and operators are doing would be beneficial for the business, ultimately being a contributor to help reduce their operating costs.
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Toyota 32-8FG30 forklift used by BetaSpuds