Your packing line
starts at 4 a.m.
We're already
watching.
Managed IT for South Florida produce distributors, packing houses, and grower-shippers. We keep your ERP up, your cold chain monitored, and your EDI to Publix and Walmart live.
Talk to us about your operation
30 minutes. ERP, cold chain, EDI, FSMA 204. No sales pitch.
Free · No spam · Email only used to send the guide
Built For
Every kind of produce operation in South Florida.
Distributors & Importers
High-SKU operations through MIA and Port Everglades. EDI mandates from Publix, Walmart, and Sysco. Margins that vanish the moment a chargeback hits.
Packing Houses & Cooling Facilities
24/7 operations where a line stoppage at 5 a.m. means a missed load window. Cold chain, FSMA traceability, and GFSI documentation — all day, every day.
Grower-Shippers & Vertically Integrated Ops
Field-to-dock lot traceability, seasonal workforce IT, and multi-site connectivity between farms, packing, and distribution.
— Sound Familiar?
If any of these happened
last week, you know what we fix.
Packing line stopped. Scale offline.
Three workers standing at the line. The truck window closes in 40 minutes. The one person who knows the ERP password isn't in yet. Nobody has a number to call.
ASN didn't get there. Chargeback incoming.
Internet blipped for 3 hours. The EDI 856 hit Publix's DC after the truck arrived. $1,800 deducted from your next invoice before you've even sent it.
Sensor offline 7 hours. FSMA gap.
Bay 3 temperature sensor dropped. Nobody knew until morning. The compliance log shows a 7-hour gap. Half a pallet of tomatoes already warm.
FDA wants lot records. In 24 hours.
Your ERP and your food-safety platform don't talk to each other. The traceability report doesn't exist. Someone's building it from three spreadsheets and last week's pick tickets.
— What's Different About Your Industry
The pain points that don't show up on a generic IT page.
Downtime is measured in pallets, not hours.
In June 2025, ransomware hit UNFI — North America's largest natural grocery distributor — and shut down ordering, shipping, and receiving across 52 distribution centers for 21 days. Lost sales: $400 million. Ransomware attacks on food and agriculture doubled in 2025. Attackers know that just-in-time logistics mean any downtime creates immediate pain — and perishability means you can't wait three weeks to recover.
A missed ASN costs more than six months of managed IT.
Your Publix or Walmart EDI 856 has to arrive before the truck does. A 3-hour internet outage means the ASN arrives late, the DC rejects it, and you're looking at a $250–$500 chargeback per incident. The EDI map that won you the account is the same map that loses it — when middleware goes down and nobody's watching.
A 7-hour sensor gap is a FSMA violation and a pallet write-off.
Cold storage runs 24/7. If a temperature sensor drops at 11 p.m. and nobody knows until morning, you have a compliance documentation gap and potentially a full pallet beyond acceptable range. We integrate temperature monitoring into the same NOC that watches your network.
The FSMA 204 deadline extends to July 2028. That's a planning window.
FDA's traceability rule requires Key Data Elements at every Critical Tracking Event. 24-hour production capability on demand. If your ERP and food-safety platform don't share lot data cleanly today, you're building that report by hand the night the call comes.
Dead zones on the dock floor mean bad loads going out the door.
Metal racking, insulated cooler walls, scanners competing for airtime — most MSPs design warehouse networks the way they'd do a real estate office. When your Zebra drops off in Bay 2, pick errors and mislabeled pallets follow.
50 seasonal workers start Monday. Nothing is provisioned.
Florida's winter harvest triples your volume almost overnight. We build seasonal provisioning playbooks — WMS logins, scanner pairing, time-and-attendance — all from one ticket, repeatable each season. When they leave, access dies the same day.
Your SQF audit is in six weeks. The documentation hasn't been touched.
Publix, Walmart, Costco, and Sysco all require SQF, BRCGS, or PrimusGFS. Auditors look at IT controls: access logs, backup verification, system change records. We keep that evidence current so the answer is already pulled when the auditor walks in.
Full-width produce photo — packing line, cold storage, or dock floor
Replace this div with an <img> tag when ready · 1920 × 680px ideal
— Compliance We Map
The frameworks your operation actually has to deal with.
FSMA 204 — Food Traceability Rule
KDEs at every CTE. 24-hr FDA retrieval. Deadline: July 2028.
FSMA Part 117 — Preventive Controls
HACCP hazard analysis, supply-chain programs, record-keeping.
FSMA Part 112 — Produce Safety Rule
Agricultural water, worker health, on-farm traceability.
SQF / BRCGS / PrimusGFS
Required by Walmart, Publix, Costco, Sysco for all produce suppliers.
Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI)
GS1 case labeling — ERP integration required for lot records.
EDI X12 (856 / 850 / 810 / 880)
Mandatory for Publix, Walmart, Kroger, UNFI, Sysco. Late ASN = chargeback.
USDA PACA
Prompt-payment rules affecting ERP and accounting records.
CISA Food & Agriculture
Critical infrastructure cyber baselines. FBI joint guidance.
— Software We Know
We don't learn your stack on your dime.
Produce ERP
EDI / Trading Partner
Cold Chain Monitoring
Food Safety & Traceability
Warehouse & Scanning
Network / Security
— Common Questions
Questions we get from produce operations.
Our packing line starts at 4 a.m. What does "24/7 support" actually mean for that kind of operation?
It means a real engineer picks up — not a portal ticket that escalates when someone gets to the office at 8 a.m. We define Severity 1 during onboarding for your operation: anything that stops a packing line, takes ERP or WMS down, kills scanner connectivity, or breaks a cold-chain monitoring feed. Sev1 target is under 15 minutes regardless of hour. Florida's winter harvest season runs November through May when your volume triples overnight. We staff for that reality.
We got a chargeback from Publix because an ASN arrived late. Is this an IT problem?
Yes — one of the most expensive IT problems produce operations have. A 3-hour internet outage on a Tuesday night means your EDI 856 doesn't hit the retailer's system before the truck arrives. The DC rejects it. You get charged back $250–$500 per incident. We monitor your internet, your EDI middleware, and your trading-partner acknowledgments continuously. When a connection blips, we know before your load leaves the dock.
FDA could request our FSMA traceability records within 24 hours. Are our systems ready?
That's the question most operations haven't answered yet — and the FSMA 204 extension to July 2028 is a planning window, not a pass. The rule requires KDEs logged at every CTE: receiving, packing, shipping, transformation. If your ERP and food-safety platform don't share lot data cleanly, you're building that report by hand the night the call comes. We map the data flows, find the gaps, and wire the integrations before FDA asks.
A temperature sensor dropped offline for 7 hours and we didn't know. How do we prevent that?
Sensor connectivity failures in cold storage are almost always a network problem, not a hardware one. Metal racking and insulated walls kill WiFi in spots that seem fine during a walkthrough. We do an RF survey of your facility, design access points for cooler geometry, and integrate temperature alerts into the same NOC that watches your servers. A 2 a.m. temperature event hits the same on-call queue as an ERP outage.
How exposed are we to ransomware compared to other industries?
Food and agriculture saw a 118% spike in ransomware attacks in Q4 2024 and attacks doubled in 2025 overall. In June 2025, NightSpire ransomware hit UNFI — North America's largest natural grocery distributor — and shut down ordering, shipping, and receiving for 21 days, costing $400M. Attackers target produce operations because just-in-time logistics mean any downtime creates immediate pain and perishability means you can't wait weeks to recover.
We bring on 40–60 seasonal workers for winter season. The IT side is always chaos.
Because it's improvised every year. We build seasonal provisioning playbooks before the season starts: WMS logins, scanner pairing, time-and-attendance, and communications — all from a single ticket, repeatable. When the season ends, access is revoked cleanly. Ghost credentials from former seasonal workers are an audit finding and a security risk.
We are a smaller distributor — 25–40 employees, one location. Is managed IT worth it?
Run the math against one chargeback from Publix. One temperature sensor offline for 7 hours. One seasonal worker with live credentials six months after they left. The cost of managed IT for your size is usually less than two serious incidents per year. What you need: reliable ERP and EDI uptime, warehouse WiFi that covers the whole floor, basic cybersecurity hygiene, and someone who answers at 4 a.m. who already knows what Aptean Fresh Produce ERP is.
— Ready to Talk?
Produce IT done by people who already know what a missed ASN to Publix costs.
A 30-minute discovery call. ERP uptime, cold-chain monitoring, EDI reliability, FSMA 204 readiness. No sales pitch — just a real conversation before winter season hits.