The Brix field runs from 12.0 to 16.0 in 0.1-degree increments — forty-one discrete values. Most pineapple QC sheets have a blank for "sweetness." That difference explains why Kapi brand fruit gets accepted by European importers and most competitors' shipments trigger spot checks at Rotterdam.
Brix is not a single measurement. It's a distribution across nine sampled units per lot, and the distribution — not the average — is what buyers negotiate. A Brix 8 reading at 13.2 alongside six readings at 14.5 tells a story about uneven field maturation that an average conceals. Buying produce at 14.2 average and receiving a lot with a 12.0 outlier is the moment when a supplier relationship degrades and a letter of credit gets disputed.
The Cost of a QC Report That Can't Be Traced
Pineapple export QC fails operationally when the report detaches from the physical lot. A supervisor writes a condition score of 1 on a paper form at the packing plant. By the time the container reaches the port, the supervisor is two sites away, the paper form is in a different building, and the importer's QC agent at destination is looking at a CR07 lot that appears to have translucency in units 3, 5, and 8 of one pallet.
The pallet barcode scan fields — Pallet #1 through #4 — solve the linkage problem. Each pallet gets scanned at QC, linking the physical pallet identifier to its crown condition photographs and its associated lot data. When an importer claims damage at Rotterdam, the responding documentation includes the specific pallet barcode, the photograph of the crown condition at pack date, and the supervisor name, brand, and week number — all in a single record.
What the Image Fields Document
The template carries nine external condition photographs, nine weight sample photographs, nine internal condition photographs, eight Brix reading photographs, and sixteen crown condition photographs across four pallets. Forty-one images per lot record.
This isn't redundancy. Each image type documents a different failure mode.
External condition photographs — Externo 1 through 9 — capture shell color, bruising, mechanical damage from field handling, and stem condition. These are the photos used when a buyer claims transit damage: the pack-date record shows what condition the unit was in before loading. A score of 0 against a field that runs from 0 to 4 means no defect found; that photograph is the evidence behind the zero.
Weight sample photographs capture the individual weight scale reading for each unit — Peso 1 through 9. Export contracts specify net weight ranges, and the pineapple sizing system — CR05 through CR12, CL04+2 through CL10+5 — defines the count per box and the expected weight band for each count. A CR08 lot running consistently to 14.8 kg when the specification is 11.5–14.5 is a count violation and a contract issue. The scale photographs are the record that determines whether the error is in the packaging or the field selection.
Brix photographs capture the refractometer display for each of the eight sampled units — Brix 1 through 8. This matters because a claimed Brix reading of 14.1 and a refractometer photograph showing 13.6 are two different data points, and the photograph is the one that holds up.
Corona photographs document crown condition at four units per pallet — two long, two short crowns photographed at the moment of QC. Dehydrated or damaged crowns are the primary cause of aesthetic downgrade at destination retail. The four-per-pallet crown sampling across Pallets 1 through 4 means that every pallet in the lot has photographic crown documentation, not a verbal estimate from the floor supervisor.
The BRIX multichoice field covers the range 12.0 to 16.0. When a lot trends below 13.5 on the majority of sampled units, the quality supervisor can see immediately that this lot is borderline for the Kapi Metro brand specification and route it to a lower-grade designation before it ships — the brand choice field at the top of the record accommodates exactly that decision.