Page 41 - Food & Drink Magazine July 2018

$6m revamp bears fruit
A revolutionary new grading, packing and palletising system is helping a major citrus packer manage a mandarin boom, writes Amanda Bryan.
AS international demand for mandarins grows, Australia’s largest packer and exporter of fresh citrus, Mildura Fruit Company (MFC) has reinvented its entire grading and packing process for the soft and easy to peel citrus fruit.
The company, which began over 100 years ago as a grower- owned cooperative, is now part of the Manassen Foods Group.
In addition to mandarins, MFC sources oranges, avocados, lemons, limes and grapefruit from more than 100 growers in the Mildura region, and exports 75 per cent of these.
One of the highest growing categories in its portfolio is the
the line required an upgrade to meet volume and quality requirements, and remove manual handling issues.
“After our design review, it was decided to replace the packing side and install a new grading system,” Process Partners senior packaging engineer Craig Gilbert says.
The resulting $6 million system and its overall design is revolutionary for the fruit industry, according to Gilbert.
A NEW VISION
The new Spectrim grading system, which was supplied by NZ company Compac,
is designed to take up to 300
of the new packing modules were purely dedicated to packing one sku at a time.”
Fruit is now automatically sorted by grade, size and weight, dramatically boosting the efficiency of the line.
KNOCK-ON BENEFITS
The increased automation also reduces manual handling of heavy boxes. Previously, MFC staff were manually packing and palletising the boxes one sku at a time. Now, a bin tipper and a forklift are used to move the fruit from the bins and into a high speed linear weighing filler.
Once the fruit enters the boxes, they are glued, weighed and sent through to one of three automated palletising lines, and then a trolley car takes the pallets off to an automatic strapping machine.
These systems boost MFC’s safety credentials as well as its delivery reliability, according to Gilbert.
Staffing issues have also been eased, he says. Because of the seasonality of its operations, MFC previously relied on seasonal workers, but now it only needs only a stable core team, so no redundancies
have been necessary.
A FRESH TAKE
“This project was really interesting for Process Partners as it was outside of our normal customer base,” Gilbert says. “This the first time we’ve worked on fruit grading. It was great to be able to take our knowledge from food packaging and apply it to fruit processing.
“Our strategy was to ensure MFC’s project worked from a cost, timeline and technology solution point of view. We looked at the risks and mitigation strategies, and we assisted with an overall plan into next five to ten years, and communicated that upwards to gain board-level support.”
Hill says, “We went from an integrated graded and packing line that was packed as it was graded off the line, to a decoupled system. This new system is now in use, and while it’s early days, and is still being bedded down, the potential advantages are clear.
“Moving from a six lane grader to an eight lane grader boosted capacity, but it was decoupling the line into grading and packing that made the difference, increasing our mandarin processing capacity by 50 to 60 per cent.” ✷
MATERIALS HANDLING & LOGISTICS
“ Moving from a six lane grade to an eight late grader boosted capacity, but it was decoupling the line into grading and packing that made the difference.”
mandarin, as local growers gear up to meet rising demand.
MFC operates two main lines in its facility, one for orange and grapefruit, the other for mandarin and lemon. Major extensions were made to the plant in 2002, but two years ago, it became clear that the mandarin line was close to
full capacity.
“With the increased mandarin production coming at us, we decided we needed to upgrade our facility,” MFC general manager Perry Hill says.
“Our existing system was close to capacity, and it also had an inefficient set up, so we asked potential suppliers to help with our initial analysis.”
One of these suppliers was Process Partners, an Australian engineering group that designs, builds and optimises food processing and packaging plants.
The company reviewed the proposed project and found that
images per piece of fruit, which are melded into a 3D image to allow accurate sorting into one of 24 grades.
The packing operation is
now based on new flexible accumulation systems that enable some of the fastest packing lines in the country. This equipment was supplied
by Italy-based Sorma via its Australian agent J-Tech, and offers a vast speed improvement.
These systems are combined with centralised palletising and automated strapping systems to remove manual handling issues and increase safety of the site and operations, according to Gilbert.
“The mandarins must be sorted into one of many combinations of grade and size, and with the old system, these were packed all at once, sowecameupwithanew method,” Gilbert says. “We used bins as buffers, and each
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