US: Technology assisting WA fruit packers in demand for perfect fruit
“If you pay $3 for an apple, it better be good,” said Miles Kohl, the executive director, justifying the millions of dollars Allan Bros. and a host of other Yakima Valley fruit packers have been spending on equipment over the past couple of years to meet the ever-rising quality demands of the global economy.
Stores around the world expect blemish-free apples. They want cherries sorted for defects, size and colour with optical scanners. They don’t just want good fruit; they want computer printouts and fibre optics telling them how good.
Washington Fruit in Yakima, Valicoff Fruit in Wapato and E.W. Brandt and Sons in Wapato all have similar upgrades in the works, driven by quality expectations as well as tightening food regulations and increasing labour costs. And it helps that most packers have the money right now.
Farmers have had a run of several good years, capped by the 2012 apple harvest of a record 130 million boxes. Prices that year reached an average of $24.41 per box, also a record, as other growing regions suffered shortages.
“It’s like everything in life: the bar just keeps getting raised higher and higher,” said Tom Hanses, packing facility supervisor for Washington Fruit. “Our customers are getting pickier and demand more.”
However, don’t expect machines to completely replace people in the packing sheds. Companies now need a new kind of technical employee to operate the computer-controlled systems. “We have to teach it what is a good apple and what is a bad apple,” said Matt Miles, process engineer for Allan Bros. and a former aerospace engineer for Boeing. “There’s a huge learning curve and a huge investment in time.”
And off to the edge, on the opposite side of the packing line from the bank of screens, stand a few employees with paring knives, slicing into a sampling of the apples, just to check the computers’ work. “Obviously, you can’t just look at the apple,” Kohl said.
Source: yakimaherald.com
