Known consignor scheme

My name is Seth, and we help Australian growers export mangoes and lychees to the USA.

Steritech is located in Narangba, about 30 minutes drive north of the Brisbane Airport. We help Australian growers get their mangoes and lychees to market in the USA. Australian mangoes that have been exported to the U.S have received great reviews with fruit quality surveys, rating them near perfect.

U.S consumers love Australian mangoes.

We process approximately 200 tonne of mangoes and lychees each year and overall about two and a half thousand tonne of other fresh produce commodities for other markets.

Recently, the U.S market added security requirements on cargo going to the U.S via air freight, and we identified that the supply chain needed someone to become a Known Consignor so that Australian mango and lychee growers could continue exporting to the U.S.

Farm to Fork is being able to get produce from the farm to the consumer's plate, so Steritechs role in that process is being able to provide the finest sanitary treatment that enables market access for various fresh produce commodities. The Known Consignor process for Steritech involves performing a 100% piece level inspection of mangoes and lychees that get exported to the USA.

This is to ensure that each consignment is free of any security threats.

We then perform a fibre sanitary treatment on the fresh produce by irradiating the produce. Irradiating the produce involves sending palletised units of mangoes and lychees on a conveyor through an irradiator which is a large concrete bunker in which we house a radiation source. Irradiation treatment takes approximately one hour itself, following treatment we then store the produce, so we remove the pallets of mangoes and lychees from the irradiator, put them into cool rooms where they’re stored until they are despatched. The security measures that we have in place include secure fencing, CCTV monitoring, alarm monitoring and staff security awareness training.

These features we already had in place prior to becoming a Known Consignor so the Known Consignor scheme fitted in well with our existing security measures.

Hi, my name is Greg O’Neill I’m the Managing Director of Barrett Communications. We are located in Perth about 30 minutes from the airport. We manufacture and export a range of HF and VHF tactical products and commercial products for a range of customers around the world.

We’ve been in existence for around 40 years, with our key line of products have been the HF range, and in more recent times we have introduced a range of VHF tactical products for military customers, and that has been quite successful for us over the last seven or eight years. Our business turnover varies from year to year depending on a contract basis so it can be anywhere from 30 to 50 million dollars and of that virtually 100% is export roughly 98%. And out of that somewhere between 5 to and 10 million would be exported to the United States.

The impact of what has been happening around the world over the last three or four years have increased demand of the security of products and integrity of what we export. The US have been a fairly key player in that and has pushed forward the requirements of individual inspection of goods on arrival in America.

The actual process of becoming a Known Consignor was not that difficult for us in terms of timeframe. The nature of our products and the requirement for export control and approval from the defence export control office in Canberra and also from the Department of Foreign Affairs requires us to have a reasonably high level of security anyway for high level of encryption and such items so the Known Consignor scheme fitted in reasonably well with what we were already doing and took us to a slightly higher level of security.

The various components of the radio are assembled, and then they go across to stock as a semifinished item. Once the radio has been completed and moved into our pre-sales area, it will then be programmed according to the customers’ requirements.

Once that’s finished, and the entire individual order is completed it will then be taken out to our dispatch area, where it is packed along with the ancillary items that go with the goods. When it goes out to dispatch for packing it’s assembled with a range of other items.

We then check that process as part of the QA process; it is cross checked and made sure nothing is left off that list. Ultimately the performance of Barrett products on the world stage and particularly how we are moving into the United States is a very good news story for Australian exporters.