Tomra Food Showcases New Technologies

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 company showed publicly for the first time the upgraded Tomra 5B sorting machine. Suitable for potatoes, fruit, and fresh-cut produce, the Tomra 5B introduces new features which give unprecedented precision of control, enhancing yield and profitability.

Compac – the leading provider of post-harvest solutions to the fresh produce industry – unveiled its next-generation sorting platform. Building on Compac’s market leading Multi Lane Sorter, the new platform introduces a range of features for enhanced hygiene and food trust, gentle handling, safety and performance. 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.

Michel Picandet, Head of Tomra Food, commented: “The Tomra 5B sorting machine, the next generation sorting platform, and CURO8 filling system will help food producers and packhouses enhance their efficiency and profitability at the same time as ensuring the highest standards of food quality and safety. These are important new additions to Tomra Food’s product line, which offers sorters and graders of many different types and sizes.”

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.

The Tomra 5B offers the choice of four frame widths, from 800cm to 2000cm, and operates at belt speeds of two to five meters per second. As the produce moves along the belt, foreign material and produce imperfections are detected by anything from one to six on-belt cameras, a laser, and an off-belt camera. The cameras, which provide a 360-degree view with 0.27mm pixel resolution, are capable of detecting defects as small as 1mm. The off-belt laser, which operates with nine color and infrared ranges, detects up to 99% of foreign material. High-speed air jets remove from the line objects which need to be rejected or passed through a further sorting machine. To reduce false rejects, the pressure and position of the air jets adjusts automatically according to the type, size and weight of the produce.

Jeffry Steemans, product manager for the Tomra 5B, summarized the benefits: “The new Tomra 5B sorting machine gives operators unprecedented levels of flexibility by offering a broad range of settings which are easy to control. In addition to ensuring food quality and safety, the Tomra 5B minimizes food waste to improve yield and further increases profitability through the precision of its quality settings.”