Salai's Commitment To Quality
Salai embodies this mindset in our business too. Clients are not a quick sale. Every client is, to us, a long-term business partner, whom we intend to do everything reasonably within our power to make a success. We want to deal with clients five years later when they need an additional production line. Over a decade plus later when they decide to replace whatever machinery they bought before. We want them to be able to recommend us to their friends in the industry. We want to become the first name that comes to mind when growers think about automating or expanding their facilities, not just a fleeting one-time intermediary. As part of that commitment to quality service, Salai provides full resources available for installation, and can even arrange for Japanese engineers to help with the on-location set-up. We are a one-stop service that can connect growers to any element of Japanese expertise and help translate and localize the Japanese system for diverse markets.
A typical story that I’ve heard several times from growers who bought the cheapest mushroom growing equipment they could find is this: machinery arrives on the farm. Several parts are missing/broken. Inquiries about the issue are either ignored or denied. The growers end up scouring hardware stores and making end-arounds to get the machine running. The instructions for setting up the machine are often next to useless. After-service is almost non-existent. I’ve had at least 3 growers tell me that after dealing with the stress and irritation of setting up a particularly frustrating piece of equipment they never wanted to buy cheap again.
Another common story is that when something breaks, it’s often difficult to impossible to even get replacement parts for cheap mushroom growing equipment. The process can take months at best. Special modifications and customizations are impossible, as the equipment is one-size fits all. Sakato grow bags, often considered to be the gold standard for mushroom cultivation, are also difficult to use, if unusable, with most cheaper machines. Japanese machines and bags are built to be as efficient as possible, because companies are operating with profits that are just cents on the dollar or even less. A dozen failed bags or bottles can wipe out the profit made from an entire batch of mushrooms. A machine that doesn’t perform as advertised and sends work over the planned time -just a little more labor costs can also wipe out the profit of an entire batch of production.
These are all hidden costs. They are after-costs. A grower might use a search engine to browse machinery and find a cheap supplier and then thinks: “wow, this costs half of what the Japanese machine I got quoted on cost”. If a grower is only thinking about the short-term bottom line then they don’t see the lack of customer support, installation difficulties, machinery that isn’t as labor time efficient, nor the difference of using sub-par grow bags to their long-term bottomline. Nor do they see losses from malfunctions or simply from the lower expected lifespan of the equipment. Cheap machines make a trade off somewhere; they’re cheap for a reason and whether that’s because they are built very simply and do almost nothing to reduce labor costs, or because they are built to last 5~6 years on average which is far less than the Japanese counterparts, there is a trade-off somewhere.