Digitising the harvest: from lost paper slips to prices applied in bulk
At Irmãos Lacarini, a fig grower and exporter since 1969, every fruit delivery from the sharecropper families was recorded on paper.
Delivery slipand the note I wrote next to it?
where is yesterday’s slip?
Spreadsheet · harvestTyping in every slip, product by product, and pricing item by item.
one slip a day, all lumped together
checking: “accepted as it is”
The family records
The checker counts
Works without signal
The office applies prices in bulkDelivery slips no longer get lost.
Families record every delivery on their phone, even without an internet signal.
The office no longer types in a single slip.
They arrive ready and checked, and prices are applied with filters that speed up closing.
Families use it every day.
And they are looking forward to the next versions of the app, which will make things even easier for them.
- My role
- Product designer and service designer: field research, process design, wireframes, development follow-up, rollout and training
- Period
- July 2026 to date · phase 1 in use
- Deliverables
- Sharecropper app, checker app and admin dashboard
- Users
- More than 70 users, from around 35 sharecropper families, aged 18 to over 60
“There would be no point in building an app that speeds up a process that does not exist.”
Everything relied on trust alone
At Lacarini, the people who plant and harvest are sharecroppers: families who work on the company’s farms and are paid for what they produce. Every fruit delivery generates a delivery slip, the document that says how many boxes of each product left each farm.
That slip was a piece of paper, filled in by hand in the field. And the paper got lost: sometimes before it reached the lorry, sometimes with the driver, sometimes at the checking point itself. When a family wrote a note next to a product, it was hardly ever seen in the rush of receiving the fruit.
At the end of the line, the office typed every slip into a spreadsheet, product by product, and then priced each item to work out how much to pay each family at the end of the month. During the harvest, from October to January, there are around 3 to 4 slips per family per day. The team worked from morning to night to pay on time, because if payment is late, sharecroppers stop producing in the middle of the harvest, and the fruit has orders in Brazil and abroad.
All of this ran on one thing only: trust. Between the family, the checker and the office, there was no shared record.
The process on paper was not the real process
The original brief was to digitise the delivery slip. Before designing any screen, I went into the field with the team: I interviewed sharecroppers and checkers and followed the receiving of the fruit on site.
The research showed that the process the company believed existed was not the real one:
- A slip was supposed to be filled in at every lorry collection. In practice, families did one a day, lumping everything together, precisely to lose less paper.
- Checking barely existed. Whatever arrived was accepted as written, when the paper arrived at all.
If I had digitised the paper as it was, the app would only have sped up a process that was not happening. The problem was not the screen. It was the service.
