TOMRA technology helps cherry packer refine operations
Prima Frutta Packing is a family-owned business based in Linden, California, founded in 1991 by Tim Sambado to pack produce from orchards on and around the family’s ranch. It packs high-quality cherries using the latest packaging technologies to ship across the U.S., as well as to Asia and other regions.
The business has grown steadily, and 10 years ago, it introduced TOMRA Food sorters into its processing line to achieve the quality demanded by its customers and to reduce food waste.
“We pride ourselves on our consistent quality, day in and day out, season to season,” Tim Sambado, Prima Frutta president, said. “Our customers look for us to deliver a high-end quality product as well as excellent service. We can’t do our business without technology and information.
“We are obsessed with data, and we are obsessed with getting the best technology in the world.”
In 2023, TOMRA Food was in the final stages of development of its AI-powered LUCAi platform, ready to trial its innovation with customers in different conditions and regions — from California to New Zealand. Sambado was eager to see how it could help his business.
“We wanted to become more accurate, to simplify the system for our operators, and to be able to detect some defects that, in our traditional mapping system, were more difficult,” he said.
After the 2023 cherry season, Prima Frutta installed LUCAi on all processing machines — a total of 132 lanes for 2024.
“Thanks to LUCAi, the era of compromise is a thing of the past for our customers,” said Benedetta Ricci Iamino, global category director for cherries and processed vegetables at TOMRA Food. “It guarantees the packaging of top-notch fruit, meticulously sorted and placed in optimal boxes, prepared for the most favorable market prices. LUCAi excels at handling various cherry qualities with precision, consistently segregating fruit classes for different markets — even in challenging batches — thus preventing fruit waste and potential market claims.
“Our customers can now confidently expect their best fruit, in prime condition, reaching optimal markets, all at highly competitive prices.”
Superior sorting
Two long-standing customers who have been running TOMRA equipment for almost 10 years, both based in Central Otago, New Zealand, also implemented the TOMRA LUCAi technology on their InVision 2 grading platform: Dunstan Hills, which grows cherries primarily for global export; and Panmure Orchards, a family business founded in 1952 and now in its sixth generation serving the domestic market.
The three cherry growers share the challenge of meeting growing demand with consistent high-quality produce in the short cherry season, which typically begins in mid-May and finishes at the end of June in California. In New Zealand, the season runs from early to mid-December to late January.
After one full season with TOMRA LUCAi, the growers achieved higher productivity, enhanced quality selection with consequent higher margins for customers, and reduced food waste.
“With LUCAi, we achieved better grading and increased throughput of around 10% — and it is easy to use,” Ian Nicholls, Dunstan Hills operations manager, said.
LUCAi’s user-friendly interface software makes it easy for operators to get the best sorting and grading performance from their processing line.
“It allows us to make changes and gives us accurate data on how it is going to impact our grading before we apply the change,” Sambado said. “This means that the operators can do things with much more confidence and quickly. They don’t have to do a lot of sampling and testing before they can apply a change because they get the data immediately.”
This immediate feedback is a game changer, because “in the cherry world, when you’re running 40,000 cherries a minute, you just don’t have a lot of time to sample,” he said.
This not only helps cherry packers deliver consistent quality and meet specific customer requirements but enables them to increase productivity.
“With LUCAi making more accurate decisions, we are able to put more fruit in front of the sorters,” Nicholls said.
Next-level grading
Factors such as stem interference, a high load of fruit under the cameras, doubles and tangled cherries can contribute to incomplete presentation that often challenge traditional systems, which can struggle to detect defects when cherries are partially visible.
LUCAi’s smart algorithms are specifically designed to ensure that even the smallest and most difficult-to-detect defects are identified as long as they appear at least once, helping maintain high-quality grading and a reliable throughput of kilograms per hour.
Chelan Fruit, a TOMRA Food customer in the Pacific Northwest, saw the results firsthand this year. Even with lots containing up to 30% culls, the company was able to redeploy 40 people away from manual sorting while achieving a clean packout.
LUCAi effectively detected defects such as rain cracks, stem bowl splitting and severe bruising, ensuring cherries were consistently graded and packed to the highest standards without the need for manual intervention.
Data mining for the future
LUCAi for the InVision 2 cherry grading platform comes with data collected by TOMRA in different regions across the world, building pre-trained models using real images of cherries.
The platform uses TOMRA’s deep learning technology to identify an extensive range of defects — from edge cracks to open sutures and cosmetic blemishes to stem pulls.
“We have seen a significant increase in the quality of machine-graded fruit with LUCAi,” said Jeremy Hiscock, managing director at Panmure Orchards. “We would be devastated to not have access to this technology.”
The platform continuously learns from the data it collects while running. TOMRA’s service team can use that data and the customer’s feedback to build defect models to meet specific needs and quality requirements.
“It’s an evolving process, teaching it the powdery mildew defects, insect bites, freshwater cracks that we’ve had after a rain — things that were very difficult on our traditional mapping systems,” Sambado said. “The LUCAi, through training, has seemed able to get these types of specialized defects more effectively.
“As we move into the future, we realize as a company that we all have to keep getting better. Expectations keep going up. Everybody expects a better product, delivered on time, without any excuses. TOMRA Food technology will help us meet those demands.”
