PMA Fresh Summit, Compac: "Our vision is a lights-out packhouse"

The global specialist in grading and sorting lines, Compac has presented its brand new sorting and grading platform, Spectrim at PMA Fresh summit 2015.

It's 30 years since Hamish Kennedy developed the first Compac sorting whilst completing his masters in electrical engineering for the kiwifruit orchard his family owned in New Zealand. Today Compac occupies a dominant position in New Zealand, Australia and USA with sorting and grading solutions designed for, amongst others; kiwifruit, apples, citrus, cherries, avocados, stone fruits, tomatoes, onions and potatoes.

Compac’s Europe business has doubled in size

"North America represents 60% of our business" stated Mike Riley, CEO, he adds: " we record a strong growth in New Zealand, South Africa and Chile. Europe is also a growing market for us following the purchase and integration of Spanish company Formesa last year, which is now Compac Europe".

Compac has made great investments in Europe and so Compac Europe has doubled size in just one year. " When we bought Formesa , one year ago, the company operated with 20 people, now we have 50 team members. We have invested in a new factory near Valencia that will be inaugurated in November.

This will be a facility for manufacturing, service and sales. We want to manufacture much more in Europe.

" A lot of technology by image"

The key differentiator for Compac solutions lies in the specialist technology developed for imaging.

Mike Riley: “What our customers want is a good balance between accuracy, speed and reliability. We have built in California the largest citrus packing lines in the world: The pregrading machine is 97 meters long, 70 lanes wide, processing 52 millions of mandarins/day! The lines operate 10 to 12 fruits/ seconds. Not less than 60 pictures are taken for each fruit. To process this much data reliably, you need the best expertise across your organisation.”

have a look on : https://vimeo.com

Unveiled at PMA Fresh Summit, Compac’s next generation sorting platform was seen by the market for the first time: “Spectrim” has been presented with state-of-art technology for imaging. After 6 years of research, this machine creates the best conditions, and particularly the best light to enable cameras to work with accuracy and precision.

With the ability to capture up to 500 images of every single piece of fruit, this system represents the next leap towards a completely “lights-out” packhouse with minimal human input.

The system is also modular and upgradeable “We look to develop long-term relationships with our customers” Riley Explains “This platform will be with them for some time and as such, our team has developed it in such a way that new technology can simply “bolt-in” upgrading their capabilities. For example when advances in cameras allow us to deploy new technology we can make that available to our customers quickly and easily as an upgrade”.

A light-out packhouse

Mike Riley, CEO has joined the company one year ago. His past experience was in the network monitoring industry providing network solutions to some of the world’s largest banks, government agencies and corporates.

He explains: “Our vision is a light-out packhouse. We believe that the new grading technology will remove people from the operations. Today there are still manual operations, but in the future we want a completely lights-out operation.”

“The other mission is data management. The packers want to be sure that they have the right produce, the right grade, with the right quality at the right place."

" We know how to build a completely integrated information system that can bring a lot of benefits to our industry. Growers can anticipate the quality. Retailers & resellers can build up their marketing plans and promotions programs according to the quantity and quality of products they will get on the shelves. The more info the industry have, the better will be the customer experience.”

“After an average growth of 25%/year during the last 5 years, we need to get the best people to continue to grow and to do this we’ve made a number of key appointments from related technology industries to augment the team here at Compac. We also want to take care of our customers and to be sure that our industry understands what is possible.”

Compac will give "Spectrim" its European unveiling at the next Fruit Logistica in Berlin.