Hectre, double award winners in the AgTech Breakthrough Awards, have announced that their latest innovation, the Spectre for Pears early fruit sizing app, has now been released to the market.
Bartlett pears being sized by Spectre for Pears. The award-winning simple to use tech delivers high value to industry.
It provides pear growers and packers with fast and accurate size profiles, simply by taking a photo of a bin of pears with an iPhone or iPad. The tech uses machine learning and computer vision AI to detect and size pears within seconds. With more than 80 pears per bin being sized, size samples are massively increased delivering reliable fruit size data for informing the pick, the pack, and sales, earlier then ever before. The app can be used in the orchard from the first pick, or in the packhouse, and in any conditions.
A Spectre for Pears Top Down solution is available for large scale enterprise growers and packers wishing to capture early size data straight off the top of trucks arriving at receiving. With the Top Down option, more than 3,000 pears can be sized before the truck even unloads and an API for data share is available.
As an enterprise business working with huge volumes of fruit, Sage Fruit started with the Spectre iPad option several years ago and then upgraded to the Spectre Top Down solution when it became available. Shane McKinley, Director of Quality Control at Sage Fruit says: “Every change on the packing line requires a movement of materials and labour to make the changes, which means we are not running at full speed. So having accurate size profile information ensures we don’t end up with a reduction in throughput.”
“We’ve had an incredibly talented team of engineers working on the Spectre for Pears project, which can deliver huge cost and time savings for our customers,” said Hectre CEO and Co-founder, Matty Blomfield.
“With Spectre, we quickly find out the size distribution of the block. That information is then shared with our sales department so they can get to work selling the fruit before we’ve even packed it,” says Washington Fruit & Produce Technology Program Leader Gilbert Plath.
During ideation and development, Hectre works closely with industry, ensuring the technology is highly relevant, pragmatic and fits the brand focus of “simple to use”. Sage Fruit, and NZ grower RJ Flowers Ltd, provided valuable industry collaboration throughout the Spectre for Pears development process.
The release of Spectre for Pears follows Hectre’s global success with mobile fruit sizing apps Spectre for Apples, Citrus and Cherries. The fruit sizing app is being used by premier packers including Monson Fruit, Rockit, CPC, FirstFruits and BC Tree Fruits. An onion model is also available. Hectre will offer a Series A investment round in the second half of 2023.
For more information:
Kylie Hall
Hectre
Tel: +64 27 419 8322
Email: kylie@hectre.com
www.hectre.com