TOMRA Food showcases New and Innovative Technologies at Fruit Logistica

TOMRA Food, Compac, and BBC Technologies have all exhibited new technologies on TOMRA Food’s stand at Fruit Logistica Berlin this week (Berlin Messe, 5-7 February).

The world’s leading fresh produce industry event, known for spotlighting new solutions and concepts, attracts close to 80,000 visitors from more than 120 countries.

Revised TOMRA 5B sorter: flexible settings to optimize yields

TOMRA Food’s improved TOMRA 5B infeed belt sorting machine is designed to remove even the smallest foreign materials from lines of fruit or vegetables, ensuring food safety, and to allow the operator to easily adjust sorting criteria to the required food quality, eliminating the unnecessary disposal of useable produce.

By introducing new features which give unprecedented precision of control, the TOMRA 5B enhances yield and profitability.

Compac also showed its recently-introduced UltraView inspection module, which significantly improves detection of difficult defects located in the stem bowl and tip areas of the fruit.

UltraView takes the power of the Spectrim platform to the next level. It improves pack accuracy and takes another step in the direction of a fully automated pack line.

Compac’s next generation sorting platform: future-proofing food safety

The new Compac sorter is based on the industry-leading MLS multi-lane sorter but incorporates technical developments to further enhance hygiene and food trust. The new platform also future-proofs packhouses in case of tightening food safety legislation and more demanding market expectations.

The new platform is capable of sorting a wide variety of soft fruit to an exceptionally high degree of accuracy. Designed from the ground up to meet the need of modern packing requirements, the new platform delivers industry-leading performance for weight, size, gentle handling and throughput.

Food trust is critical and Compac’s new platform has maximized the balance between gentle handling, throughput and hygiene. Wherever the fruit comes into contact with the sorter, the machine’s components are made of injection-molded plastics or food-grade stainless steel.

These materials stand up to the harsh environments within a packhouse, resistant to juice and other corrosive elements, and allow the use of optimized chemicals for faster and more effective cleaning of components such as load-belts, cross belts, singulation sections, covers, and spill chutes.

In another innovation, many of the food-contact components on the new design are engineered for quick-release. This enables faster and more effective deep-cleaning by allowing the toolless removal of the machine’s lane dividers, double brush, chutes, brush drop, and cross-belt. Food-grade plastics resistant to cleaning chemicals are also used, for the machine’s chutes, ramps and sweeps.

Whereas a cross-belt would previously have taken hours to dismantle and clean, in a task requiring specialist staff and tools, now it can be cleaned thoroughly without specialist skills in as little as 15 minutes. And to avoid the interruption of stopping the line to disassemble the belts for cleaning, the new design features a cleaning mode which allows the line to continue running at a safe speed while staff clean the belts.

These improvements make it easy to ensure optimum standards of hygiene at the same time as increasing productivity and gentle handling. More than this, Compac’s new sorter is designed to give owners the perfect balance between food safety, operator safety, throughput, gentleness of produce-handling, and total cost of ownership.

Compac also exhibited its UltraView inspection module, which was launched in late 2019. UltraView maximizes the performance of Spectrim, the world’s most powerful fresh produce grading platform, by identifying defects which are otherwise difficult to detect located in the stem bowl and tip areas of the fruit.

New CURO8 filling system: accurate and gentle

BBC Technologies’ new CURO8 filling system, which has eight filling stations, is an addition to the range which includes the CURO2, CURO12, and CURO16 models.

The CURO8 was introduced in response to customer demand, for businesses which do not need the capacity of the CURO12 or CURO16 models. With eight filling stations, it offers packers an economical option with an even smaller footprint.

The CURO8 was designed for cherries, blueberries and small tomatoes and accommodates a range of final pack options. Its low drops and minimal transitions ensure the fruit is handled gently. The CURO8 is capable of filling 125-gram packs of blueberries at a rate of up to 110 packs per minute.

The CURO8 has the same user interface as the other machines in the fill-by-weight range and integrates with Line Control to minimize personnel dependency. Following behind BBC Technologies’ MIRA360 or KATO260 graders, the CURO range increases productivity by improving efficiency and improves profitability by reducing overweight packs and minimizing fruit give-away.

Multiple CUROs can be implemented in a single packing line, allowing growers to simultaneously pack for different markets.

BBC Technologies also chose Fruit Logistica Berlin to spotlight LUCAi™ artificial intelligence software. First made available in 2019 as an add-on for the KATO260 optical blueberry grader, LUCAi™ informs the machine how to classify each individual piece of fruit by processing up to 2,400 individual images of fruit every second.

LUCAi™ is also able to view fruit in wavelengths not visible to the human eye, further enhancing its sorting accuracy. LUCAi™ is sensitive to subtle defects in the fruit, such as dehydration, bruising, and early anthracnose.