Potato, citrus, stone fruit processing equipment unveiled at PMA Fresh

TOMRA Food has a strong presence at PMA this year with a state-of-the-art sorting machine and two innovative new products.

The Produce Marketing Association’s Fresh Summit, held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Orange County, California, is the largest in the Western Hemisphere for the fresh produce and floral industries. Approximately 19,000 people from more than 60 nations are expected to visit the three-day event (Oct. 17-19).

TOMRA Food displayed its state-of-the-art TOMRA 5A sorting machine for potato processing. This achieves an unrivaled 98% removal rate of foreign objects, ejecting from the in-feed belt unwanted materials such as stones, corn cobs and roots, wood, glass, plastics, golf balls and metals.

Compac inspection module to fruit defects

Compac is unveiling UltraView, a new inspection module that integrates with the Spectrim cabinet to maximize grading performance. The only solution of its kind for boosting detection of stem bowl and tip defects in fruit, this will increase line efficiency for various types of fresh produce such as apples, lemons, stone fruit, kiwifruit and avocados.

Compac launches UltraView, enhancing the market-leading Spectrim grading platform UltraView is a new inspection module that integrates with the Compac Spectrim cabinet to provide ultimate detection of defects located in the critical stem bowl and tip areas of the fruit — defects that can be difficult to detect due to their shape and location. The UltraView module contains a dedicated set of high-resolution multi-spectral (color and infrared) cameras and LED lights which are located ideally close to the fruit, parallel to its direction of travel. In this unique position the UltraView cameras generate superior quality images for accurate inspection of the fruit’s stem bowl and tip regions. The module’s location on the sizer, directly after the Spectrim cabinet, means that the fruit on the carrier is ideally oriented for presentation to the UltraView sensors. UltraView was field validated in trials run through full pack seasons at sites in the USA and New Zealand. UltraView reduces the need for manual checking for difficult defects, which causes line slowdowns. This results in improved line efficiency and lower packhouse labor requirements, as well as increasing opportunities to adopt tray-filling automation.

Compac’s Spectrim optical sorting platform and Inspectra near-infrared sorting platform recently won the PwC Commercial Impact Award at the 2019 KiwiNet Awards for the development of world-leading fruit grading and sorting technologies — public recognition of Compac’s commitment to groundbreaking research and development, which has also led to UltraView.

AI software for blueberry grading

BBC Technologies is launching LUCAi, new artificial intelligence software for grading blueberries which can be easily retrofitted to their KAT0260 for better classifications and more refined sorting. This improves sensitivity to subtle fruit defects, such as dehydration, bruising, and early anthracnose.

For further information about TOMRA, please see www.tomra.com.