Revolutionary Upgrades to Sensors and Insight Tools Lead to Better Bottom Lines for Processors. 

The booming popularity of kettle chips (known in some parts of the world as ‘crisps’) brings potato processors a mixture of opportunities and challenges. Opportunities lie in the strong demand for a potato-based product that commands a premium price. Challenges arise because what originated as a low-volume ‘artisan’ snack must now be produced in vast and faultless quantities for big-brand retailers with reputations to protect.

For vegetable processors, the saying that “knowledge is power” is especially true now that they can use the new TOMRA Insight web-based data platform. By gathering detailed data from sorting machines, this subscription-based service gives processors more knowledge about what’s happening on their lines and the power to make better-informed decisions. This is transforming sorting from an operational process into a strategic management tool.

TOMRA Visual Assist virtually places TOMRA's expert in front of the customer's machine, enabling a fast response and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, overcoming travel restrictions and addressing safety concerns.

VIRTO GROUP, the largest frozen vegetable company in Spain and one of the most important in Europe, has again put its trust in TOMRA. The company has updated its main plant in Azagra (Navarra) with eleven Nimbus BSI+ sorters. This frozen vegetable mixing, packaging, storage, and distribution center is one of the most technologically advanced in the industry.

Fulfilling the two biggest responsibilities of IQF vegetable processing, food safety and product quality, can sometimes seem like mission impossible. Though processors are tasked with preventing foreign materials and imperfect produce from reaching the end of the line, these difficult-to-see enemies can also be difficult to stop. Extraneous vegetable material (EVM) and foreign extraneous vegetable material (FEVM) are often unseeable by the human eye and not always detectable by conventional sorting machines. But now there is a groundbreaking sorting technology which makes the previously impossible possible.

LEGUMBRES SELECTAS SIERRA NEVADA, a Spanish company, based in Granada, specializes in producing, processing, and marketing superior quality pulses. It is the Spanish market leader and is one of the top 5 companies on the European market in processing lentils, beans, and its own-production chickpeas. The company has found the Nimbus BSI+ by TOMRA to be the solution to the issues specific to grading pulses. This technology has achieved improved quality and food safety, a ten-fold increase in its production capacity, and a much more automated, controlled, and efficient process for its staff.

TOMRA Food has launched its Arabic language website, providing a dynamic online platform for its Arabic-speaking customers.

The new responsive website, tomra.com/ar-eg/sorting/food, offers visitors insights into TOMRA’s product innovations, latest news and event updates for audiences across the Middle East.

This guest article is an expert opinion from Cindy van Rijswick, Senior Fresh Produce Specialist from RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness