Mariani Packing Company, the world’s largest family-owned producer of premium quality dried fruit, has deployed Loftware’s Smartflow to automate its packaging artwork management processes.

Mariani is the world’s largest independent and family-owned producer of premium dried fruit products. Since 1906, the Mariani family has been providing quality dried fruit to consumers and customers all over the world. Each year Mariani produces over 150 million pounds of dried fruit.

Smartflow is a configurable and automated artwork management platform offered as Software as a Service (SaaS), which eliminates manual processes and all paper files by making all content accessible in the Cloud. It streamlines the packaging concept-to-shelf process with customised workflows to gain efficiency and virtually eliminate manual mistakes.

Prior to engaging with Loftware, Mariani was handling artwork management and workflow approval processes through time-consuming manual efforts, such as email attachments and job jacket folders. Smartflow will provide Mariani with an ‘efficient and streamlined’ Cloud-based workflow system to managing its entire packaging design and approval process for over 200 SKUs of dried fruit products, which are produced and delivered to more than 40,000 retail outlets in the US and over 65 countries worldwide. 

Mariani went live with Loftware Smartflow in July, 2021, with plans to roll out the SaaS to other areas of the business in the following months. With Smartflow, multiple stakeholders can review artwork in parallel and further enable digital collaboration with the Company’s external vendors and partners. By using the software, Mariani hopes to improve its existing processes, enhance collaboration with involved stakeholders, and reduce time-to-market for releasing products to both consumers and private label customers.

Kristine Bonovich, senior business manager at Mariani, explained, ‘We were in the process of a brand refresh and at the same time we knew it made sense to find an online platform that could accommodate all of the artwork management needs of our growing company. Smartflow can be completely customised for all of our business requirements, while offering a workflow solution that can help in other areas of our business, supporting our companywide Continual Improvement Process (CIP) initiative.’

She added, ‘Smartflow provides infinite possibilities. Loftware Smartflow will help us save time and money.’