When Alice Mureverwi moved to South Africa in 2013, she had no idea that she would end up in the agri-processing industry. The 34-year-old Zimbabwean had graduated with a degree in industrial engineering and has initially worked in the heavy manufacturing and supply chain industries.
“I got into agri-processing as a fluke. I was working for a company in [the] supply chain [industry], and I wasn’t happy. I needed a change when this opportunity came out,” she recalls.
The opportunity came from a large agri-processing company based in the Western Cape. They needed industrial engineers to help manage their apple packing system. “It was something challenging and something I’d never really thought of. Because you know, yeah, I love apples, I buy apples, but I never really thought about the whole process of how apples move from the farm to a supermarket.”
After successfully applying for the role, Mureverwi started managing the packing of huge apple orders for both local and international customers.
“Say this week we’re supposed to pack up 21 containers of apples for Tesco in the UK. My job is, [after getting my] weekly instruction, to do the planning of how we’re going to pack all those 21 containers for that specific client.”
Her role, which she has since left to further her studies, usually included the planning and arranging of more than one client’s order at a time. She needed to take several factors into consideration, such as the quality of the fruit, the maturity of it and fruit treatment. “I also had to liaise with the packing material department to ensure that we had the specific packing material needed to pack these orders.”
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Navigating the challenges
Agro-processing can be a difficult space in which to work and Mureverwi is honest about the challenges she faced. “Black women, we all face the same challenges. People don’t take us seriously. People question every single thing about us and we have to work twice as hard as everyone else to get to places.”
In South Africa, the agricultural space can also be tricky to navigate if one does not speak Afrikaans, something the Zimbabwean-born engineer discovered early on. Despite learning the language and working diligently, she was still hard pressed to get promoted.
“I worked for a company where we had three sites and there were only two women who were packing managers. And it’s like, why? Are we saying women can’t do this? So that’s a big challenge.
“Shattering that glass ceiling is a big thing because it’s there and it is Pyrex, so it is [very thick].”
Despite the difficulties Mureverwi faced, she still found inspiration in her work. Packing managers work towards weekly targets, something that Mureverwi found exceedingly satisfying.
“I loved the feeling at the end of the day of having achieved my goals. In our industry, a lot of the time we had weekly goals; things that we were supposed to do in a week, orders that we were supposed to pack, fruits to process and things like that. It’s like you get a little high of ‘Oh, I was supposed to do this and I nailed it. Oh, we’re supposed to do this and we did it in record time’. So that’s what I loved about it.”
Mureverwi has recently ended her stint as a packing manager after six years in agri-processing. Her experience has helped her secure a spot at three international universities, much to her surprise. Soon, she will be emigrating to complete a master’s degree in data science.
Advice for aspiring packing managers
Mureverwi says that being a packing manager requires a high level of patience. “You work with a lot of people who have been doing the same thing every single day for ten, fifteen, twenty years. So you know you have to have a lot of patience in terms of getting these people who’ve been doing the same thing for so long to understand why things are changing.”
Aspiring packing managers also need to know how to deal with pressure and must be prepared to exercise their interpersonal skills to the fullest.
“It’s quite a high-pressure environment. And if you couple high pressure and long working hours, it is a Molotov cocktail for you to literally lose your mind. Still, go into it if you have the drive. It is very fulfilling.”
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