Saige
Labs

Du Roi Laboratory is Africa's largest banana tissue culture producer — ISO 9001 accredited, supplying to 42 countries, with 30+ years of industry leadership. As Marketing & Logistics Coordinator, I authored the company's complete 2025 marketing communications function.

The business operated across international B2B markets spanning Africa, the Middle East, and Europe — each with different communication needs, seasonal dynamics, and customer profiles. Marketing spend of approximately R350,000 per year needed to be planned, allocated across 20+ line items, and executed end-to-end. Events, publications, digital channels, international media, executive reporting, and CRM all fell under a single role.

Annual Marketing Strategy: Authored and administered the full 2025 marketing communications plan — competitive analysis, market segmentation, channel strategy, and budget allocation across all line items covering local and international markets.

Executive Reporting: Designed and produced the company's Sales & Deliveries management dashboard, translating complex delivery data (2.1M+ plants, 16 export countries, 91 customers) into a polished board-ready presentation with charts, infographics, and year-on-year benchmarking.

Flagship Event: Conceptualised, planned and executed the annual Banana Workshop — event communications strategy, invite design, speaker coordination, 22 exhibitor management, and post-event reporting across 70 attendees representing 38 farms.

Publication & Editorial: Produced the company's commemorative 30th anniversary newspaper-format publication — feature editorial, global supply statistics, 42-country infographic, photography direction, and full brand consistency.

Digital & Website: Managed LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram channels; authored the full website redesign brief including information architecture, navigation, Spanish language capability, and content strategy.

Marketing without operational literacy is half a job. Owning both the creative output and the business reporting gave every campaign a grounding in what was actually happening inside the operation — making communication more credible externally and more useful internally.

A single role can carry an entire marketing function when systems are right. Across events, publications, social media, international media, executive dashboards, and CRM — all running simultaneously — the key was structured planning and disciplined prioritisation, not headcount.

For over 25 years, every customer delivery had been recorded on paper. An ISO 9001 questionnaire — covering product quality, order accuracy, documentation, timing, and customer feedback — was completed per consignment, printed, photographed, and filed by country. The record-keeping was meticulous. The problem was that once filed, those records were effectively inaccessible for day-to-day use.

If a customer called about a previous delivery, finding the answer meant physically paging through a country file. Corrective actions triggered a separate manual form in a separate file. Field visit notes went into journals or WhatsApp messages. The ISO compliance process was being completed as a tick-box exercise — sometimes retrospectively before audits — rather than generating real business intelligence. 1,498 sales entries across four years, all previously recorded on paper by one person.

I redesigned the workflow from scratch on Monday.com — building a single delivery record capturing everything relevant to each consignment and customer relationship: product specifications, shipment details, quality photographs, customer feedback, pricing notes, standing preferences, and any corrective actions raised.

The ISO questionnaire fields were embedded directly into the delivery record. Quality photographs were uploaded at point of packing. Corrective actions were logged within the same record. Compliance stopped being a parallel administrative task and became a by-product of normal operations.

For management, I built a live dashboard translating CRM data into the views needed for monthly EXCO meetings: total order volume, country-by-country breakdown, top customers by quantity, variety distribution, new customer tracking, and satisfaction ratings — all updated automatically.

Information only has value if it's accessible when you need it. The data existed for 25 years. What changed was whether it could be retrieved in a thirty-second conversation with a customer. A standing airline preference logged in the system meant the next problematic shipment could be framed proactively — before the customer complained.

Compliance requirements are an underused source of customer intelligence. The ISO questionnaire had been completed per delivery for years. Integrating it into the CRM turned the same effort that previously produced an audit document into a four-year satisfaction trend, complaint history, and corrective action log — all in one place.

In 2014, a family farming business founded in 1942 began building a soft citrus venture in Ohrigstad from bare land. There was no packhouse. No orchards. No administrative infrastructure. By the time the first trees were planted in 2015, the operation needed someone to build its entire administrative and reporting backbone from nothing — and to grow that system in step with an operation expanding from 51ha to 279ha over six years.

Five separate farms with distinct water rights, orchard blocks, cultivar allocations, and yield projections. A 12,400m² packhouse with 59 packing outlets and multiple grade channels. A seasonal workforce of 115–130 staff. Six international accreditations — GlobalG.A.P., SIZA, TESCO Nurture, Albert Heijn, Freshmark, and SAMSA — each with its own documentation requirements and audit cycles. None of the reporting systems, templates, or compliance documentation existed when the role began.

Daily Production Reporting: Designed a multi-variable Excel system capturing — per day, per cultivar — bins picked, picker headcount, kg per picker, tons tipped, packed weight, cartons across all market grades, packout percentage, export cartons per ton, and year-to-date running totals versus forecast. The operational heartbeat of the packhouse during season.

Strategic Orchard Model: Built a tree census and yield projection model tracking every block across all five farms — cultivar, rootstock, plant year, spacing, hectares, water allocation, and estimated tons per hectare from year 3 through full production.

Board Intelligence: Produced the annual production report synthesising three years of actual data against forecast — by cultivar, farm, and metric — presented as a structured board document rather than raw data.

Compliance Architecture: Designed and maintained all documentation for six simultaneous international accreditations. SIZA achieved Platinum rating on first audit. SAMSA Method 2 certification enabled verified container weight methodology for every export consignment.

Administrative infrastructure is a strategic asset in capital-intensive startups. Whether operational data becomes actionable intelligence or disappears into filing cabinets is an administrative design decision. Building the right systems early meant that by commercial scale, management had three years of clean, comparable production data to guide decisions.

Well-designed systems multiply capacity in a way that headcount cannot. The daily production report, orchard model, board summary, and six compliance frameworks were all maintained by one person — because each system was designed to capture the right information at the right level of detail, in a format immediately usable by the people who needed it.