OptiServe delivers optical sorter for baby carrots to topfresh
Healthy snack products such as baby vegetables are taking stores by storm. Unlike, say, mini cucumbers or baby spinach, baby carrots are often not a separate variety or early harvested product. Long carrots are chopped, scrapped and selected to leave a nice, uniform product. A useful tool for this convenience segment is an optical sorter.
A successful relationship
TopFresh has had one of these for the past two years. The Flevoland-based company sources its carrots from the surrounding area. The carrots are processed in the company’s own facilities in Kraggenburg, after which the baby carrots go to various customers at home and abroad in various packages from consumer units to bulk.
For production TopFresh mainly uses the long, slender Imperator carrots with their beautiful color and they are first pre-sorted for foreign objects. After this, they are headed, washed, cut and sorted by size via a roller sorter. The day after, they are then scrapped and polished and taken care of by our Xcalibur.
Watch the Xcalibur doing its work at TopFresh
Short supply of carrots
One of the great advantages of the optical machine is that there are many options in terms of adjustment. By reducing the loss product, TopFresh achieves a higher yield. However, it is never pure loss product because the carrots that are sorted out eventually serve as animal feed.
Another strength of the Xcalibur is that it allows the exact yields of the plots to be known. “And there are obviously big differences in that. Although we do change plots every year, of course we do not return to fields with lower quality.” Says Klaas Hiemstra of TopFresh.
Win-win between capacity and manpower
Before TopFresh started using the Xcalibur, everything was sorted by human eye and manually, and then only on spots and length. The capacity remained the same, namely about 1,700 kg/hour, but the number of employees went from 8 to 2. In addition, a constant quality now shows itself in TopFresh’s baby carrots, because hardly any discoloration escapes the Xcalibur’s cameras.
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