AGRICULTURAL NEWS - In an effort to deliver better quality fruit to consumers, distributor of South African apples and pears, Tru-Cape Fruit Marketing and its parent packhouse Two-a-Day, have invested in new technologies to improve their final product and reduce quality-related claims amounting to millions.
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.
