Ken Moynihan "Investment in Compac is investment for 10 or more years, therefore our latest technology can answer challenges of the future and be added to all existing platforms"

Compac, part of TOMRA Food, showcased their latest upgrades. Ken Moynihan, Compac’s CEO shared with Fructidor the latest innovations in their next generation sorting platform.

The company introduced a new hygienic sorter platform, building on the success of their Multi Lane Sorter, but with additional technical developments to further enhance hygiene and food trust. The new platform is capable of sorting a wide variety of soft fruit with exceptionally high accuracy. It helps packhouses to answer future tightening of food safety legislation and more demanding market expectations.

Food trust is critical and Compac’s new platform has maximized the balance between gentle handling, throughput and hygiene. “This sorter platform physically handles fruit and moves the fruit through the sorter, explains Ken Moynihan. “Every aspect of that machine that touches the fruit has been upgraded. All surfaces are now stainless steel and can be removed and cleaned, with no tools, without special skills or training.”

“All belting parts can be removed and changed very quickly. As hygiene and fruit safety became a must for our customers, they must clean more and this cleaning takes a lot of time and efforts. For example, usually removing belts takes an operator +/- 1 hour. With this platform the machine operator only needs minutes, shares Ken.

Such improvements make it easy to maintain optimal hygiene standards while also increasing productivity and gentle handling. The new Compac sorter is designed to provide customers with the perfect balance between food safety, operator safety, throughput, product handling gentleness, and total ownership costs.

Compac also demonstrated its recently introduced UltraView inspection module, which greatly improves the identification of difficult defects in the fruit stem bowl and tip areas. UltraView integrates with Spectrim to improve line performance and reduce slow-downs that can occur when lots with high incidences of defects are packed. It addresses hard-to-detect defects and aims to reduce the need for manual grading on the line, and encourages pack automation solutions to be implemented. Inspection module has initially been focused on apples with additional use cases for lemons, avocados, stone fruits, and kiwifruit being explored.

“All our upgrades and innovations are focused on more accurate sorting with technology, hygiene and are able to answer the challenges of the future. Every time our customers invest in us, investment is for 10 or more years. Inspectra² and UltraView are examples of technology that can be added to our existing platforms, so our current customers can continue to upgrade with us and invest step by step”, - adds Ken Moynihan.

For further information about Compac, please see www.compacsort.com