The Jersey Royal Company Installs Haith Destoners

Haith Group teamed up with UK-based The Jersey Royal Company to equip the former’s packing facility in St Saviour Jersey with three new destoners. The machines, which are part of the pre-packing area, have helped The Jersey Royal Company reduce their labor costs, as well as potato and machinery damage through the wash plant process.

Before Haith's Supaflume destoners were installed, stones were removed from the crop by hand, a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.

Due to the small size of Jersey new potatoes, Haith had to undertake significant development work to ensure the de-stoners could remove the very smallest stones.

"Obviously Jersey potatoes are known for their smaller size, and due to the tight pitch webs used on the harvesters to capture all the precious potatoes it is not uncommon to find small stones mixed in with the tubers," says Duane Hill, sales director at Haith Group. "Due to the potatoes and stones having such similar densities it’s a real challenge to consistently separate the two, that’s where the highly efficient and accurate Supaflume comes into its own. Jersey Royal also set us the challenge of fitting our destoner to their existing washers. This wasn’t a problem for our innovative design team and they even modified the cascade infeed chute to accept the crop at the full width of the feeding box tippler,” Hill explained.

Haith's Supaflume destoner can handle up to 20 tonnes of 10 to 45mm baby potatoes per hour. Mounted onto The Jersey Royal Company's existing barrel washers, the combination has proven to be effective.

Established for more than 20 years, The Jersey Royal Company farms 1,800 hectares on the island of Jersey. Its 450 staff pack over 20,000 tons of the internationally recognized and protected Jersey Royal new potato, which are sold to a wide number of UK retailers, wholesalers and processors.