Page 29 - Packaging News Jan-Feb 2020

MEMBER PROFILE TOMRA FOOD
LEFT & BELOW: TOMRA Food’s almond sorting solutions are adding value at Australia’s Laragon Almond Processors.
The value of automation
TOMRA Food sees automation as vital to food production and processing – and backs up this vision with a suite of innovative technologies tailor made for the food industry.
Though TOMRA is well-known for its waste management innovations such as the reverse vending machines used in container deposit schemes – which is where it all started – the company bills its Food division as the leading supplier of optical sorting and processing technology for fresh and processed food.
According to Ashley Hunter, senior vice president and head of TOMRA Food Sorting, the division has approximately 10,500 sorting installations globally and helps to shape the future of food through innovative technology.
“As a future-focused company, we look forward to meeting tomorrow’s challenges with revolutionary technology that continues to meet our customers’ evolving needs,” he says.
Automation, according to TOMRA, has already proven itself in four key constants of the industry: maximising yield, waste reduction, production line reliability, hygiene and safety.
“From improved sanitation and more efficient processes, to removing the need for staff training, reducing the risk of injury and minimising waste, to enabling sophisticated grading for multiple product streams, the benefits are significant and growing.
As a result, automation is also driving growth. “In addition, experts have done away with the
old-fashioned view that automation will put millions of people out of work. In fact, our current workforce has proven itself unsustainable. Automation is the answer to that issue, and it is now hailed to become a net job creator,” says TOMRA.
TOMRA Food’s technologies are already paying dividends for Australian businesses such as Laragon Almond Processors, an independent and specialised almond huller and sheller, which has installed the TOMRA Nimbus BSI+ sorter for almond kernels, and last year participated in a machine and application validation for the TOMRA 3C optical sorter for its inshell almonds.
During the 2018 processing season, according to Mark Webber, general manager of Laragon, the BSI+ sorter achieved more than 98 per cent removal of foreign material and product own defects, as well as more than 90 per cent efficiency on even the most complex pinhole insect damage.
“I was fortunate enough to go over to West Sacramento and look at the machine in demonstration form. It performed exceptionally well there; it was almost too good; the performance was
excellent. We came back with that information and thought that if the machine could do seventy-five per cent of what we observed when we were over there, we would have an excellent machine,” he says.
The trial of the TOMRA 3C sorter resulted in an inshell product purity of around 99.5 per cent, adds Webber, and its clean-in-place capabilities meant just one 10-minute calibration was required mid-season.
“Yield optimisation was one of the key factors we originally looked at because we were hoping to be able to run our grower’s product through and take the very small amount of inferior product out – in that regard, the machine has done exceptionally well.
“What we’ve got now is almost a ‘set and forget’ machine in that we get it set up and we can run it with a minimal amount of operator input. We can rely on the machine to get the job done every day,” he says.
With technologies like these across the food processing industry, TOMRA says it is demonstrating the value of automation – from a futuristic “nice-to-have” only a few years ago to a necessity today.
WWW.PACKAGINGNEWS.COM.AU JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 029