Is there something weird about the Cannery?

Question

The Cannery building is unique in Tropico 3 in that it can take several different kinds of raw material - fish, coffee and pineapple. I've always assumed that it accepts all of those, all of the time, and produces canned goods for export. However I've noticed a couple of times that even when I have producers of all of those raw materials (Fisherman's Wharf, Pineapple Farm, Coffee Farm) the Cannery ends up without stored input much more often than I would expect. Is there something odd about the way the Cannery works, such as maybe only accepting the same kind of raw material that it has input stockpiled?

Relatedly, there is an improvement that only applies to coffee. Does anyone know how that is calculated? Does it have an effect on anything else canned?

Answer 1

There are a couple of questions here, so I'll answer them one by one.

1. I would guess that the reason that you have no stockpile, is that your raw materials are either being consumed, exported, or purchased before making it to the cannery. Fish and pineapple are open to consumption by your Tropico population. So, if you're not producing a surplus of other food sources (corn, meat, etc.) then your population will consume the fish and pineapple as a food source. Also, the fact that teamsters are notoriously slow doesn't help the resources to get picked up before being eaten.

2. Coffee: $1300; Canned Coffee(without Cannery upgrade): $2400; Freeze-Dried Coffee(with cannery upgrade): $3000

3. The coffee upgrade only applies to coffee. It will not have an impact on any other goods produced at the cannery.

To remedy the raw materials situation, you can try a few things:

1. Build your cannery nearer to your fisherman's wharf and your docks to shorten the distance from the initial gathering of the raw materials to your cannery. However, building your cannery out in the green belt with your farms won't necessarily help. It will be a longer distance to move the final product to the docks, and your teamsters will have a harder time getting to it.

2. Build a teamster's office nearer to your cannery, fisherman's wharf, and farms. Also, you can try building more teamster offices to increase the number of teamsters, thus increasing the likelihood that a free teamster will pick up the raw materials before they're consumed by your population.

3. Build garages and roads. The quicker workers can get places, the quicker they can do their jobs. Farmers will get more farming time in, and teamsters will have an easier time putting in the raw materials and picking up the finished goods.

I hope this helped. Let me know if you need further clarification.

Answer 2

A couple possibilities spring immediately to mind:

1. You don't have enough teamsters to move goods from your farms/fisheries to the cannery. If this is the case, you'll probably see rather large output storage by said farms. Build more teamsters' unions, preferably near the production buildings, and do your best to make sure they're not impeded by heavy traffic.

2. Alternately, you're not producing enough food and the fish and pineapple is being transported to the markets instead -- meals have priority over export production. Build more corn, papaya and banana farms, as well as cow and goat farms.