Harvest Planning for

a Regional Fruit Cooperative

Overview

A regional network of 12 family-owned fruit farms in eastern Europe faced a recurring seasonal challenge: aligning their raspberry and apple fruit harvests with short, volatile market windows. Weather shifts, unstructured data, and guesswork-based planning often resulted in missed demand, unharvested crops, or rushed sales at low prices.

Working with Sphere, the cooperative implemented a lightweight AI and data analytics platform that helped them forecast local market demand, anticipate peak harvest windows, and make better decisions with the data they already had—no sensors, drones, or advanced infrastructure required.

Challenges

The cooperative faced rising inefficiencies as production scaled—without the tools to forecast demand, coordinate harvests, or prevent waste. Data existed, but it wasn’t being used to drive decisions.

Last-minute retailer orders made it difficult to plan harvesting and sales in advance.

Without forecasts or alerts, farms missed chances to optimize pricing or pool logistics.

Each farm managed records separately, with no shared view of yields, pricing, or timing.

Crops were harvested based on habit, often exceeding demand and leading to waste.

Our Solution

Sphere helped the cooperative build a simple, cloud-based data insights tool using open-source AI components and Excel-friendly dashboards.

Key Achievements

Better alignment with buyer orders and weather trends led to more precise harvesting and less spoilage.

Instead of last-minute rushes, farms contacted buyers 4–5 days in advance with realistic quantity estimates, improving pricing and relationships.

Farmers began syncing harvest dates and pooling logistics when needed, based on shared data they trusted.

No cameras, no IoT, no dev team, just smart use of spreadsheets, open tools, and simple predictive models.

Result

This case proves that AI doesn’t have to be complex to be useful. With just basic data, a little modeling, and a simple dashboard, a group of small farms turned scattered spreadsheets into actionable decisions. Our client didn’t need new tech, they used only the right questions, the right signals, and a partner to help them translate data into impact. As one farmer put it: “We used to guess. Now we know when and how much to pick.”

Organizations around the world trust us

Hear from

our clients

Hear from our clients

Lee Ebreo

VP of Engineering at Credit Ninja

These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system and if we did not partner with Sphere to help us achieve our goals.

Selah Ben-Haim

VP of Engineering at Prominence Advisors

Our experience with Sphere and their team has been and continues to be fantastic. We keep throwing new projects at them, and they keep knocking them out of the park (including the rescue of a project that was previously bungled by another vendor).

Ben Crawford

Senior Product Manager at Enova Financial

I would expect to be delighted. It's been a really positive experience, working with Sphere, and I would expect you to have the same.

Mark Friedgan

CEO at CreditNinja

Sphere consistently prioritizes the needs of their clients, demonstrating both agility and teamwork. As an offshore team, they have been an integral part of our organization and we plan to continue growing with them.

René Pfitzner

Co-Founder at Experify

Sphere provided excellent full-stack development manpower to augment our team and help push our product forward. They are easy to work with, tech-savvy and proactive.

Bruce Burdick

Chief Information Officer at Integra Credit

We've been working with Sphere and its excellent consultants since our founding. I've found that they are true partners in the success of our business.

Jemal Swoboda

CEO at Dabble

The resources and developers that Sphere Software provides are skilled and have the required technical expertise, but more importantly, they have helped us build a culture of excellence within our team.

Arthur Tretyak

Founder and CEO at IntegraCredit

With Sphere, we were able to migrate in half the time it would take to train an additional FTE… and for a fraction of the cost. Our experience with Sphere has been exceptional.

Lee Ebreo

VP of Engineering at Credit Ninja

These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system and if we did not partner with Sphere to help us achieve our goals.

Selah Ben-Haim

VP of Engineering at Prominence Advisors