Another one of our foundational “use cases” that we helped solve the needs of a local strawberry grower.

While they had a large operation, the strawberries weren’t always ready to pick. Typically between 1-3 times a week, depending on various conditions, they’d hire between 8-20 pickers to go through the fields and harvest fresh central coast (California) strawberries. Many of these strawberries would be in a grocery store on the other side of the country in a few days.

We were able to not only enroll the farmer onto the platform. But also his 100+ temporary workers already on his cell phone. Saving him countless hours a week of headaches between calling workers, to managing hours and paying the workers. Now it takes a minute for him to setup a new harvest schedule. Notify everyone in his favorites tab. Then pick who he wants that is available. Not everyone is great pickers, but if push comes to shove, he’ll take a weak picker rather than let fruit go bad. The handy ratings scale helped him rank his various pickers so he can keep track who is good or not.

Another plus is he doesn’t have to do ID checks anymore. The Hefe platform handles all that paperwork on enrollment to the platform. This saves him even more time with all government headaches and W-2 filings.

Hefe sets up all the workers as 1099 contractors, which enables these workers to build a business on the platform. One day they might be a picker, the next they are painting a fence for a local home owner. Actually, a lot of the pickers are construction tradesmen that do picking to earn extra money on days off. Every dollar counts in their mind. Pickers are amazing people. Personally, doing it for an hour is back breaking and you have to have an amazing eye. I had to give it a try.

While, strawberry picking is one use case. In agriculture there is always need for extra help. Hefe helps farmers get those small tasks done without needing to drive to “the spot” picking up folks that you have no idea if they can do the job or not.