Moroccan berry market is moving fast, a growing market for BBC Technologies

Met during Morocco Berry Conference in Agadir on dec 5th, Nick Hall, Sales Manager Europe of BBC Technologies  explains the last evolutions in technology  sorting lines and about blueberry market trends.

Nick Hall:  We  are proud to have participated in  the first conference for berries in Morocco. We wanted to be there to promote berry - solutions for growers and, as importantly, to support the Moroccan berry industry. Overall the conference has been very positive. We have seen extraordinary attendance for a first conference! I must also mention the high quality of speakers and great organisation.

Can you introduce your company?

Nick: BBC Technologies offers turnkey solutions for small fruit, mainly blueberries, cherries, and cherry tomatoes. We work with all sizes of operations by providing modular and scalable solutions. Our machines can fit small growers’ needs and then customers can adapt the machine when capacities increase. Machines are processing from 200 kg/h up to 4000 kg/h. Our company has headquarters in New Zealand and has joined TOMRA group 2 years ago.

What is your company expertise?

Nick: We began as berry growers and then started developing technology to support our own berry growing operations. BBC Technologies was created 20 years ago with sales of sorting machines for blueberries. Since then, we have adapted the solutions to customers’ needs with full solutions: infeed, sorting, grading, filling in clamshells, punnets, or boxes, weighing, and packing, and traceability. BBC Technologies is the only provider who offers complete end to end solutions. We are also the only company offering artificial intelligence for blueberry grading.

What trends do you see on the market?

Nick: In the blueberry market, demand is increasing. As a global industry, packers and growers want to be able to classify premium products, to be able to grade different quality streams for different markets; therefore, they require greater accuracy from their sorting machines. Our company has recently launched LUCAI™, new AI driven software (Artificial Intelligence) - for more sophisitcated blueberry grading.

Concerning trends in Morocco, growers are just starting to make the move from manual sorting to -automated lines. We are installing 2 lines for blueberries at the beginning of 2020. We have received increasing demand from Moroccan growers in the last few months, driven by two factors: volume and increased  quality.

How do you cope with arrival of new Berries varieties? Does it affect the results of your machines?

Nick: These new varieties do not affect our machines’ performance as we develop  our technology in a specific way. Our Berry Science program analyzes a wide range of berry varieties through different growing conditions and weather patterns. Our technology is based on optical expertise that has been 100% developed internally by the BBC Technologies’ team. We have catalogued more than 250.000 images of blueberries through our Berry Science Program. This is the largest collection in the world. As new varietiesare introduced, we add more images and data to our library collection.

Every packer has their own opinion about what is a good or a bad blueberry based on their market demands. That’s why we leave the definition of quality to our customers.  Every grower and packer can choose  levels of quality they want and can create different grading programs according to their specific varieties and characteristics.


Contact : BBC Technologies, The Netherlands
www.bbctechnologies.com
Mr Nick HALL, Sales Manager Europe
Mob : +44 (0)747 434 3328
Nick.hall@bbctechnologies.com