French Potato Packer orders Herbert Engineering washline

Ets Gourgues, french potato, packers now wash their potatoes on a recently completed Herbert Engineering washline.

The French potato packers are based near Bordeaux, producing approximately supplying 20,000 – 25,000 tons of premium quality potatoes each year to French supermarket chains. The new washline is a replacement and upgrade of an existing system, and will offer throughputs of between 15-17 tonnes per hour.

Herbert Engineering completed this major European installation in December 2011.

The new washline incorporates a delivery elevator, delivering dirty potatoes into a specially adapted destoner, before they pass into a 4 meter Barrel Washer for cleaning. Once the potatoes have been washed, they are dried via a 15 row roller drier and then moved onto a grader module where they are graded to remove smalls before passing over a continuous height conveyor. From here the potatoes are then run towards the sorting and packing areas.

Herbert’s French distributor Filpack made the introduction of Herbert to potato packers Ets Gourgues, who were impressed by the build quality of Herbert’s machines and the high standard of customer care.

Initially, Herbert arranged a site visit to two of their existing washlines in the Netherlands and Belgium, to demonstrate to Patrick Gourgues how the systems worked and could be adapted to suit the needs of different businesses. Having seen the washlines in operation allowed the customer to work closely with Herbert to design the correct layout for their washline, and several options were looked at and revised drawings presented to Gourgues before the final decision was made.

Source: Herbert Engineering News