Dates come from the orchard carrying insects, eggs and field dust — that is the starting condition, not a failure. The factory's whole job is to receive infested fruit and ship clean, safe product. Plants that treat fumigation as a routine spray rather than a validated, recorded treatment fail audits and lose export consignments.
Why Date Packing Lives or Dies on Disinfestation
Fumigation must be conducted under defined conditions, validated and documented — with worker safety controls, because the same gas that kills insects endangers people. Around it sit solar drying, washing and sorting, pitting and stuffing (with aflatoxin control on nuts), final fumigation and packing, all in a facility built for one-way flow.
What the AGS Date Factory Guideline Covers
Fifty-one chapters and six annexes aligned with Codex CXS 143-1985, related codes and ISO 22000:
- Supplier control and orchard provenance
- Fumigation and disinfestation — conditions, validation, records and safety
- Primary solar drying, washing, sorting and final drying
- Pitting, stuffing and aflatoxin control of nuts
- Packing, final fumigation, labelling and storage
- Process parameter tables and an establishment inspection checklist
Annex B gathers the process parameters and verification indices in one place, Annex C provides the establishment inspection checklist, and Annex D covers cleaning and disinfection including the rules that apply after insecticide use — a detail most programmes miss. Annexes E and F add the Codex/ISO 22000 conformance map and the jurisdictional adaptation register.
Who It Helps
Date packers and exporters, agricultural cooperatives, plant managers and QA teams, and inspectors auditing fumigation operations. Export packers will find the validation records especially useful for phytosanitary files.
Get the Guideline
Download the Date Packing Factories guideline from AGS now — instant delivery in fully editable Microsoft Word format, ready to support your licences, exports and audits. Because it arrives as a Word document rather than a locked PDF, you can add your logo, adjust values to your jurisdiction and issue it as a controlled document within your own management system — no retyping, no reformatting.
Product: Date Packing Factories — available as an instant-download, fully editable package from AGS (SKU AGS-03-009).