Tru-Cape invests in new technologies for higher sorting intelligence

Conrad Fick, marketing director for Tru-Cape, says that the newly installed Greefa 10-lane sorter can process eight fruits per second per lane at Two-a-Day in Grabouw and is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. “Combined with the new iFA light technology that “sees” into the heart of each apple or pear that is processed, we can now deliver a better final product with fewer issues,” he says.

Fruit-friendly X-ray

“Three technologies converge to produce the highest level of sorting intelligence available on the market today and with the iFA sorting at Two-a-Day we will soon be able to look inside the fruit to check elements such as measuring Brix - the amount of sugar in the product - and checking for defects such as internal browning which could not, until now, be determined without cutting into each piece of fruit.

“Two-a-Day’s quality manager Johan Saayman explains that the iFA technology shines a high-intensity light through the fruit and the software, which is programmed for differing conditions, measures the variance in the intensity of the light produced by the lamps and the light received underneath each piece of fruit to determine any internal irregularities. “In basic terms this is a fruit-friendly way of taking an ‘x-ray’ of each fruit without harming it in any way,” he says.

Fick says that as consumer tastes and demands become ever more exacting, Tru-Cape’s packhouses’ ability to add algorithms that sort to ever higher colour and blemish-free standards becomes essential. “Although harmless, and not impacting on the eating quality of fruit, stem-end russeting (the brown markings around the stem of a Golden Delicious, for example,) is only cosmetically pleasing to a certain standard,” he says.

Detecting potentially damaging trends

The Greefa cameras can calculate the level of russet better than any other. “On bicolour fruit, for example, stem-end russet is even harder to discern without the value that the cameras deliver. Saayman explains: “Not only can the system measure sunburn on apples as well as tell the difference between hail marks and other blemishes, but it can also track fruit bruising better than any comparable system and now also flag for core rot, internal browning and even low fruit pressures.”

Fick says that Tru-Cape shares the information gleaned from the sorting technology at Two-a-Day with Ceres fruit growers as well as their growers and packhouses in The Langkloof. “Our competitive advantage is not only that we source our fruit from a wide range of climatic areas but that we can share any relevant information from analysing fruit with our growers and can use it as an early-warning method to detect any potentially damaging trends.”

Fick says the investment will save millions of Rands as Tru-Cape will be improving productivity and returning maximum value to growers by not delivering fruit that might be rejected on arrival because of not meeting the packing specification or of showing signs of internal damage.