From Spreadsheets to Same-Day Visibility: Inside IMG Citrus’s Year One With Clarifresh

IMG Citrus has been growing Florida citrus for nearly 46 years. Now in its second generation as a family-owned business, the company has grown into a year-round importer as well, with a quality control program that touches everything from arrival inspections to line processes to age inventory checks. As volume climbed year over year, IMG’s leadership team faced a familiar question: how do you scale a QC program without simply throwing more people at it?

Their answer started with an 18-month search and ended with Clarifresh.

A familiar starting point: Spreadsheets and email

Before Clarifresh, IMG Citrus ran quality control the way many produce companies still do: through a patchwork of Google spreadsheets and email correspondence. Day to day, that meant opening one spreadsheet after another to piece together a full picture of inspection data.

It worked, but it was slow. Every report had to be manually compiled and sent. Every comparison across processes meant flipping between files. And as IMG’s volume grew, that manual overhead grew right along with it.

The team wasn’t just looking for software that would digitize what they already did. They wanted a partner that could check several boxes at once:

• Save time and improve data organization and reporting
• Streamline internal review across sales and QC teams
• Support clear, consistent communication with grower partners
• Stay user-friendly for inspectors in the field
• Integrate with IMG’s ERP system and feed data into Power BI
• Commit to ongoing innovation, not just a one-time tool purchase

That combination of requirements led IMG to Clarifresh.

Built around the inspector, designed to scale

Clarifresh’s QC automation platform gives inspectors a mobile app for capturing inspection data in the field, supported by computer vision that assists with measurements like size and color to bring more consistency into the evaluation. Once an inspector completes a sample, the data flows into a cloud-based platform in real time, where it can be compared against quality standards and shared automatically with trading partners.

For IMG Citrus, that meant bringing more than ten distinct daily processes onto a single platform, including arrival QC for both Florida-grown and imported citrus, line processes, age inventory checks, and the company’s two-part Florida grading process (P1 and P2).

One feature in particular stood out to the IMG team: the ability to run a single inspection and compare it against multiple saved standards. With perishable products, getting the right fruit to the right customer depends on far more than simple first-in-first-out rotation. Comparing one inspection against several standards at once gives IMG’s sales, QC, and operations teams a fuller picture to work from when deciding how to route product for the best outcome and the least waste, while still meeting both customer expectations and grower partner needs.

Less Manual Work, More Time to Think

The shift away from spreadsheets changed more than just where the data lived. It changed how fast IMG’s teams could act on it.

Scheduled reporting has become one of the most valued parts of the platform for IMG. Previously, sending weekly reports to grower partners meant manually compiling and sending each one by one. Now, they set the day and time once, and the reports run automatically:

• Weekly reports go out to grower partners on a set schedule
• Internal teams receive line process and inbound reports every morning at 8 a.m.
• No manual compiling or sending required once the schedule is set

That shift mattered most heading into the Southern Hemisphere season. IMG set up its full grower network with automated weekly reporting ahead of the season’s start. The response was almost uniformly positive. Partners found the format clear enough to need no further explanation.

Internally, faster access to more detailed data has changed how IMG approaches decisions. With information arriving faster and at a more granular level, the team is now able to think more deeply about how to use that data, across retailers, grower partners, and every other part of the business, to consistently land on the best outcome for all parties.

The payoff: time, confidence, and capacity

Asked to name the top value drivers from year one, IMG pointed to time savings first, both for inspectors completing assessments and for the teams reviewing and sharing that data afterward. But the second benefit was just as important for a growing business: IMG can now do more without growing its QC headcount at the same rate.

That matters because IMG Citrus is scaling fast. Having clearer visibility into how long inspections and reporting actually take gives the team confidence that QC capacity can keep pace with volume growth, without overwhelming the people running it.

What’s next for IMG Citrus?

Looking ahead to the next Florida season, the team is planning to build out taste profile data, including brix and acidity readings, directly into their Clarifresh reporting. The IMG team also pointed to field inspection data as a next area of integration, with the long-term goal of bringing every data source the business relies on onto a single platform for faster, better-informed decisions.

The team has effectively become their own back-end administrators within the platform, comfortable adjusting standards and building out new reporting while leaning on Clarifresh’s support team only when needed. Clarifresh’s customer success team and project managers remain available when necessary, but for IMG, the platform was designed to put that control in their own hands from the start.