Sixteen farms spread across four African countries, each facing unique climates and conditions, yet all required to deliver similar quality standards for flowers travelling long distances to their market destinations. Quite a hurdle that grower Marginpar has often contended with. But they discovered PlantScout, a smart digital tool designed for the horticulture industry, and quite a lot has changed for them.
For them, a search for better data logging led them to this technology that has become a key part of their operations. This confirms the idea that with the right tool, there can be a great difference in a field as unpredictable as floriculture. In the subsequent years, the grower, known for delivering premium summer flowers, has used PlantScout to streamline its quality management, making previously fragmented processes seamless.
From Fragmented Reporting to Real-Time Tracking
How did Marginpar start working with PlantScout? Well, Bram van Mil, the grower’s Product Manager, credits this to their quest for solutions that could streamline their data logging processes. Their search led them to PlantScout.
Bram:
“We first encountered PlantScout in 2021, after discovering the app in the store while looking for digital tools that could support our Quality Assurance (QA) teams in these processes. Our main challenge then was to provide timely and consistent feedback on quality at the point of market arrival. We wanted to replace previous methods like spreadsheets, paper logs, and delayed updates with instant, structured reports.”
So, when they adopted PlantScout, Bram says, the grower has easily been able to issue weekly feedback reports directly to the farms, helping keep teams alert and standards consistently high. Additionally, the logged data now feeds into their QA dashboard, which is their ‘steering wheel,’ giving them a reliable, periodical overview of farm performances, quality characteristics, standards, and grade splits. This facilitates more informed and structured decision-making across their entire operations.
Informed and Data-Driven Decision Making
Marginpar uses several PlantScout modules—Product Development, Vase Life, Scorecards, Hygiene, and Weekly Reports—consolidating results in comprehensive dashboards. These modules highlight trends, enable benchmarking between farms and varieties, and flag recurring quality issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Close monitoring of postharvest performance, for instance, holds relevant teams accountable while alerting production teams to practices that may be influencing outcomes. Previously, this level of insight was impossible with traditional reporting methods. This development, therefore, means a quantum leap in their quality management.
Standardization Across Continents
Operating across different countries comes with its unique challenges: varying altitudes and climatic conditions, different local practices, and regulations. For Marginpar, standardization became key to scaling up and building a strong, consistent brand identity. Their processes begin with defining clear market standards, then organizing farm-level processes around those standards. PlantScout plays an important part in this standardization effort. It enables instantaneous auditing and monitoring of adherence across all locations.
As Bram explains:
“PlantScout supports these processes by enabling us to audit and monitor adherence in real-time.”
Regardless of whether a farm is in Kenya’s Naivasha, Nakuru, Nanyuki, Molo, or Juja regions or within the diverse climate zones of Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, or Tanzania, this tool ensures uniform reporting structures that make data comparable across all operations. This is the kind of consistency that has helped Marginpar to identify best practices, address weaknesses systematically, and align all teams’ performances.
Variety-Level Analysis Capabilities
One of the most important advances in Marginpar's quality management approach has been the move from crop-level to variety-level reporting. Previously, issues could only be identified in ‘broad strokes’, limiting the ability to pinpoint root causes. The granular approach now possible with PlantScout has bettered the grower’s problem-solving capabilities. As Bram explains, now, with variety-level analysis, they can detect quality challenges linked to specific genetics, growing conditions, or postharvest practices.
With these comprehensive insights, Marginpar has refined practices, guided product development, and continuously improved customer experiences. The precision of this approach has changed their prospects for the better, in how the grower approaches both cultivation and quality control. This has led to strengthened collaborations with breeding partners and other production teams.
Innovation in the Floral Lab
Perhaps nowhere is PlantScout's impact more evident than in Marginpar's Floral Lab, where the grower conducts extensive vase life testing, which is crucial for a flower business that delivers flowers considerable distances, while maintaining high-quality standards.
Bram:
“In our Floral Lab, we run several vase life programs to evaluate and refine pre-and post-treatment recipes for both new and existing crops.”
Marginpar’s Floral Lab runs intensive two-month testing cycles for commercial crops, conducting weekly evaluations, bacterial tests, and simple, transparent, and standardized (STS)-level checks where relevant. Because it operates under fully controlled conditions, the team can compare results over time and identify seasonal effects or recurring issues.
PlantScout allows them to log, reproduce, and analyze this data systematically, and the results provide both immediate test reports and long-term trend analysis that informs breeding selections, identifies strong-performing varieties, and highlights waste-reduction prospects. The digitization of this process ensures objectivity and accelerates action on the findings, which means technical insights are easily turned into practical improvements.
A Mobile-First Approach to Quality Management
One of Marginpar's guiding philosophies is that operational teams spend their time on the work floor, among flowers and colleagues, rather than behind office desks. Here, PlantScout's accessibility through desktop, smartphone, and tablet integration perfectly aligns. Quality checks and reports can be logged directly while on the job.
This convenience eliminates delays that hindered paper-based or Excel systems, making information immediately available. This allows managers to respond to issues in real time. This improvement has enabled teams to maintain their focus on firsthand quality management while ensuring comprehensive data collection.
Strengthening Collaborations and Partnerships
Still, yet, PlantScout's real-time access and transparency features have proven valuable in firming up and streamlining Marginpar's partnerships across the value chain. It enables instant data sharing with breeders, suppliers, and even customers, offering a shared platform for decision-making, which in turn builds accountability and speeds up feedback loops.
This openness means expertise from all sides is applied effectively, transforming collaboration into an uninterrupted process of dynamic partnerships, rather than being just a periodic exchange of information. And while acknowledging that collaboration requires continuous improvement, Bram credits PlantScout with helping shape how they work together with their partners.
Toward an AI-Enhanced Tool
For Marginpar, the idea remains to collect relevant and objective data and avoid overcomplicating processes as they enhance their quality management approach. The grower envisages integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into PlantScout to analyze patterns much quicker, predict outcomes—yield or vase life performance—and automate corrective actions. The goal is to easily turn insights into actions. Only action drives continuous improvement.
So, what do they have to say to others considering a similar digital transformation? Marginpar's advice is simple: “Start with clear questions: What do I want to achieve? What kind of data do I need: objective, relevant, and actionable? And, most importantly, what actions should be triggered by this data?”
Additionally, they advise that one should remember that less is more: not to overcomplicate the process. Begin small. Focus on building a reliable feedback loop. And grow from there. After all, digital tools like PlantScout are valuable when they drive real-world improvements—and for Marginpar, those improvements have been transformative.
Feature image by PlantScout. Header image by Sala Lewis for Marginpar. Unless otherwise indicated, all pictures are by Marginpar.
