Compac launches Spectrim™ retrofits for competitor packing lines
Launched a year ago, the huge demand from packhouses across the globe has seen Compac’s new 11,000m2 Auckland headquarters being fully utilized, with nearly 500 lanes sold across USA, New Zealand, Australia, Europe, South Africa, South America and China.
Compac’s pipelines are used with apple, citrus, avocado, stonefruit and kiwifruit packhouses upgrading from Compac’s previous InVision system and packhouses looking to retrofit their packing lines.
Perry Sansom, Compac VP of Marketing & Product comments on their revenue growth, “Initial adoption of Spectrim has significantly exceeded our forecast. Last year’s financial results saw Compac grow revenues by over 40%. Since we launched Spectrim, we are on track to sell 75% more lanes of blemish grading than the previous twelve months.”
"We can aggregate high-value yield data with other sources, to provide rich insights into the fresh produce supply chain."
Spectrim detects the quality of produce by taking around 500 high definition images of each piece of fruit that passes over the sorter. This detects the hardest to find external blemishes, and delivers grading which that helps ensure the highest return from their crop.
Compac has dedicated a team to making the platform more widely available on competitor sorters.
The retrofits are planned for packers who have existing equipment that has not yet reached the end of its life. This upgrade gives access to newer blemish grading without packhouses having to replace their complete line.
Retrofits are not a new strategy for Compac, in 2014 they retrofitted Booth Ranches to give them access to their inspection technology. Scott Carlisle, Food Safety Coordinator at Booth Ranches says their retrofit “allowed us to use a lot of the mechanical hardware from our previous grading equipment. They simply came in and upgraded the software and the cameras and lighting ability so it’s able to see these different visual defects that maybe we weren’t seeing, with our previous sorting equipment.”
In late 2015 Washington Fruit was Compac’s first customer to have Spectrim installed in their apple packhouse. Spectrim’s hardware and new machine learning algorithms more easily sort fruit. According to Washington Fruit, they are also experiencing reduced cost-per-pack and increased pack-out, resulting in lower overheads and greater revenue for their businesses.
Mikey Hanks from Washington Fruit describes their experience with Spectrim, “Since Spectrim, we’ve needed a smaller crew to run the line efficiently - a typical shift had 16 people sorting and now a typical shift has nobody sorting and we’re also able to run faster. It was not long into packing with this system that we were able to pull the sorters off the line and have the same consistent grade.”
Andrew McQueen, Product Manager at Compac explains how Spectrim has been designed as a platform, “It’s also future proofed, with the platform designed to allow customers to continuously update their system hardware while receiving frequent software updates to keep them at the cutting edge.”
Titan Farm’s, Ross Williams, Director of Packing shows his optimism and enthusiasm for their Spectrim installation, “For Titan Farms and the industry as a whole, I believe the future is bright. Considering the vast potential of this grading platform, the sky is the limit. I believe Compac will continue to improve upon, and develop, new solutions that will continue to increase efficiencies and reduce costs, in order to help make us better packers and provide our customers with the highest quality fruit possible.”
Perry Sansom
Compac Sorting Equipment
Tel: +64 21 40 40 40
perry.sansom@compacsort.com
www.compacsort.com