Quality and traceability, two important requirements of potato fresh packing, are threatened by market disruptions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have increased home-cooking and the popularity of fresh potatoes, packers may have been tempted to keep up with demand by sending greater quantities of potatoes down the line or setting lines to run at higher speed – but this makes quality control more difficult.

COVID-19 is deeply reshaping our lives, both personally and professionally. Since its beginning, where I live in Bergamo, we have been confronted with something unprecedented, which has marked a line between how we had been living so far and how we will come out after it. Now we are gradually preparing for what will be our new normal and all the necessary changes that this will require. While reflecting on this, I found strong parallelism with the frozen potatoes industry: heavily hit, feeling the blow, but with unshaken willingness to come out of COVID-19 stronger than before. What will be the necessary changes that will help the industry accelerate in its recovery? How can we, as TOMRA, contribute? 

The far-reaching impact of Covid-19 has influenced the way that billions of people live and thousands of businesses function. It has been extraordinary to see how people of the world, despite all of our differences, have come together to fight the virus and support each other in this time of turmoil.

So much depends on vegetable processors. Not least, product quality to protect retailers’ brand reputations and food safety to safeguard consumers’ health. But processing vegetables is rife with threats invisible to the human eye. Potentially harmful and sub-standard produce has to be identified and rejected from the processing line, yet defect-detection can be extraordinarily difficult.

Bright Light Agribusiness, one of the fastest growing private companies in the Australian almond industry, has selected TOMRA Food as its partner for an end-to-end almond sorting solution. A total of 15 sorters will be installed at the company’s state-of-the-art almond processing facility in Hattah/Victoria to achieve the processing objective of a “pack-to-grade” quality in a single pass.

Recently we announced the acquisition of BBC Technologies, a New Zealand-based company specializing in precision grading systems and filling solutions for blueberries and other small fruits. The Packer spoke with Mike Riley, Head of TOMRA Food Grading, to gain more insight on the reasons behind the acquisition and the value this move brings to the supply chain market.