Russian berry producer installs Helius and Blizzard optical sorters to deliver first-grade berries

FRESHBERRY is a Russian startup producer of berries, founded in 2019 in Pryazhinsky District of the Republic of Karelia. The company is in charge of collecting, processing, supplying, and selling wild-growing blueberries, cowberries, cranberries, and cloudberries. In March 2020, FRESHBERRY acquired an automated line for cleaning blueberries, cowberries, and cranberries.

In 2022, the enterprise projects to produce about 6.000 tons of berries, with up to 95% destined to the markets of the U.S., China, and Europe. The company is certified with the FSSC 22000, which proves compliance of its production processes with international quality standards.

Helius and Blizzard, the TOMRA Food optical sorters, were installed in the company's production sites for cleaning berries.

Quality sorting guarantees profit

Prior to selecting a supplier of the process line for cleaning berries, FRESHBERRY examined the offers of 4 important integrators, and 2 proposals suggested TOMRA optical sorters. 

Vladimir Romanchuk, General Director of FRESHBERRY, commented that the target was to acquire the most advanced and efficient line to guarantee the future success. He added that FRESHBERRY aims to produce first-grade berries, which require less than 1 percent of foreign material in the final product volume.

The enterprise’s production line includes the next stages: the feedstock passes the feed hopper and enters the vibrating screen through the crusher, where the bulk of leaves is eliminated. Then the product is sent to the air separator which eliminates branches and sticks, and enters the freezer to freeze the feedstock. The next stage is when the product goes for stemming and then to another air separator and the polisher, which eliminates the leaves adhered by freezing. Downstream of the polisher, there are Helius and Blizzard sorters. Filling and packing is the final stage.

Romanchuk said that optimal performance for FRESHBERRY is no less than 2.5 tons of berries per hour. The slower run of the feedstock along the line leads to sharp escalation of the production costs. Taking to account the relatively high volume of foreign matters in the berries, the TOMRA sorting machines deal with a really tough task, said the director. 

TOMRA Helius free-fall optical sorters can identify any color or structure deviations in the stream of the quality product due to individual laser signal transmitters. Their pneumatic guns separate immature berries and the residual foreign material after the previous feedstock processing stages.

The Blizzard free-fall sorting unit scans the product stream via pulse LED cameras, along with multispectral sensors and successfully detects color, shape and structure deviations. Pneumatic ejectors expel the foreign material in milliseconds and pass the quality product for the next processing stages. 

FRESHBERRY awaits the arrival of another Blizzard sorting unit. Soon, the three optical sorters will be integrated in the company’s production line, which is the only case in the Russian market.

Vladimir Romanchuk concluded that the main advantage of TOMRA Food sorting machines is that they allow not only to boost the final product quality but also guarantee stable maintenance of the desired quality level. 

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