Camera Ready Fruit: Diamond opens innovative ‘optic’ pear sorting machine

The company’s Parkdale pre-size operation is closed “for all intents and purposes,” said Diamond President/CEO David Garcia; though the line won’t be disassembled until the three new lines at its Odell facility are running smoothly. Diamond will continue using the Parkdale facility for cold-storage.

“Most of our pre-size employees will be moved over to our packing division, where we were having trouble covering all the lines and shifts we needed during a season,” Garcia said.

The new pre-size line, developed by the Italian company UNITEC, will be mostly automated and need approximately 15 people per shift instead of the 70 currently working double-shifts at the Parkdale and Odell processing lines.

Not only will the new pre-size line need fewer hands to do the same amount of work, it’ll be able to do that work faster: Garcia estimates that the new line will be able to process 100 bins per hour — more than the capacity of both Diamond’s old Odell facility (30-35 bins per hour) and its Parkdale location (40-45 bins per hour) combined.

“Optic(al) sorting is the big difference here,” Garcia said.

Optical sorting, also called digital sorting, is the process of sorting products using cameras or lasers. Depending on the types of sensors and the software used, the machines can recognize an object’s color, size and shape – and even structural properties and chemical composition.

While this automatized sorting is hardly new in the fruit and vegetable sector, “(optical sorting has) never been introduced to the pear industry, until now,” Garcia said.

When Garcia and the rest of Diamond’s management team went out in search of new technology eight years ago, they found a lot of development in apples, cherries and blueberries; but very little in pears.

Those that did exist were adapted from the technology used on apple lines; but since apples are significantly sturdier than pears, those machines run the risk of damaging the fruit during the process.

Diamond’s management team travelled to Italy to meet with UNITEC on the possibility of designing and building a new pre-size line specifically for pears. “We both went in with (the idea of) kind of inventing this line together,” said Garcia.

The project was delayed a year for UNITEC to demo the line and work out its bugs; but is now set up at Diamond’s Odell facility and on schedule to operate for the season.

Diamond flew UNITEC President Angelo Benedetti out from Italy to be present with Diamond staff and local growers at Monday’s landmark opening.

“Being able to see this installation … is a great happiness,” translated UNITEC project manager Orinda Gjergji. “It’s a really good moment because we always believed in using technology to bring good results to the packing houses.”