Improved TOMRA 5B has been introduced to the market

At Fruit Logistica in Berlin TOMRA Food showcased the TOMRA 5B, suitable for potatoes, fruit, and fresh-cut produce, with new features which give unprecedented precision of control, enhancing yield and profitability.

Commenting all innovations, which TOMRA Food, Compac and BBC Technologies introduced at Fruit Logistica, TOMRA’s president and CEO Stefan Ranstrand mentioned that: "There is no competitor on the market able to cover the same wide range of fruits and vegetables."

Michel Picandet, Executive Vice President and Head of TOMRA Food explains: “At TOMRA Food we always make sure that we have the latest technology. That is why at Fruit Logistica we present the upgraded TOMRA 5B sorting machine. We are here to help our customers to solve their challenges and guarantee food safety. Our technology enhances the brand, at the same time addresses energy consumption of resources, and ensures that we contribute in an active way to reduce food waste.”

“With new improvements we give operators more information about what is happening with fruit but also the status of the machine itself,” adds Jeffry Steemans, Product Manager for the TOMRA 5B. “The machine removes even the smallest foreign materials from lines of fruit or vegetables, ensures food safety, and allows the operator to easily adjust sorting criteria to the required food quality, eliminating the unnecessary disposal of useable produce.”

The TOMRA 5B operates at belt speeds of 2 to 5 meters per second and provides four frame widths, ranging from 800 cm to 2000 cm. As the product travels along the belt, foreign material and imperfections are detected by one to six on-belt cameras, a laser, and an off-belt camera. The cameras provide a 360-degree view with a resolution of 0.27 mm pixels can detect defects as small as 1 mm. The off-belt laser with nine color and infrared ranges detects up to 99% of foreign material. High speed air jets remove items from the line that need to be rejected or run through further sorting machine. The pressure and position of the air jets automatically adjusts according to the form, size and weight of the product to minimize false rejections.

New features include:
- Smart Sort, which helps operators to easily define color specifications and detection settings;
- Color Cloud, which also allows operators to program accurate color specifications to fine-tune the machine's sorting capabilities;
- a generic Shape Sort Toolbox, with a set of 30 detection tools to reject a wide range of defects;
- Datura Detection, which detects and ejects 98% of the poisonous plant 2 cm or more in diameter;
- Dynamic Cloud, which offers a real-time view of all the products that the machine sees as defects, so that detection settings can be changed if necessary;
- Improved Smart Rejection, which makes it easy to sort different qualities (e.g. AAA grade and B grade French friends)”.

TOMRA 5B can sort +50 food categories such as green beans, peas, corn, carrots, bell peppers, spinach; Fresh cut: baby leaf, mixed lettuce, processed lettuce; potatoes: French fries, potato chips, specialty potato products and others.

For more information about TOMRA Food, TOMRA 5B and other machines please see https://www.tomra.com/en/sorting/food/sorting-equipment/tomra-5b