Major Australian citrus grower-marketer Seven Fields has launched a state-of-the-art new packhouse facility in Sunraysia, which is designed to keep pace both with the explosion in the industry’s mandarin production and the demands of its growing international customer base.
The official opening, which marked the culmination of several years of planning and effort, was held on 5-6 July with a field day tour of its flagship Sunwest farm and the new packhouse facility, followed by a gala dinner.
Some 300 local and international industry officials attended the gala dinner, including the many partners involved in the development of the operation, and key customers from as far as the UK and North America.
“This day marks a watershed for us and for the Australian citrus industry,” said Greg McMahon, managing director of Seven Fields, at the official opening. “We are responding to new opportunities with new packing techniques, and we have a particular focus on mandarins, which are exploding in production in this region and beyond. We want to capitalise on Australia’s competitiveness [in international markets], which centres on the superior taste of our fruit.”
Mayor of Mildura, Councillor Glenn Milne, said Seven Field’s huge investment, which is understood to exceed A$10m, was a sign of faith in the Sunraysia region. “This facility is designed to minimise cost and maximise quality – it’s built for a purpose with a purpose,” he said.
New way of packing citrus
The Sunwest packhouse facility uses a two-stage pre-grading and packing process that is new for the citrus industry in Australia.
Under this system, fruit is pre-graded once delivered from the orchard into bins according to size, colour and quality, with juice grade fruit waste redirected from the facility. The fruit is then packed to orders on a second line.
One of the key advantages of this system, according to Seven Fields, is that it enables the company to tell how much of a particular line of citrus is available to be packed into cartons for customers, so it can draw pre-graded bins out of stock and pack them for delivery to customer requirements.
Under the previous system, Seven Fields had to rely on the harvesting schedule to deliver fruit to the packhouse and customer orders could not be reliably filled if fruit of the right size or quality was not available from the patch being harvested.
“The two-stage line permits greater flexibility in the orchard and shorter time to deliver product to customers,” said Thomas Blanc, director of French company MAF Agrobotic, which helped design the citrus packing solution and supplied the machinery for the facility together with Australian distributor Colour Vision Systems.
Colour Vision Systems’ Trevor McManus said that the facility marked a move from the traditional 'commit-to-pack' system for Australian citrus, where fruit is packed into cartons as soon as it arrives in the packhouse, to one where fruit can be packed on demand quickly and efficiently, adding that many of the ideas for the design were adapted from the apple business, where such systems have become common.
Key to the speed and efficiency is the high level of automation in the packhouse. While the new facility has created 55 new jobs, packing fruit is the most costly part of the supply chain for citrus growers, according to Seven Fields, and the operation has been designed to cut these costs.
Describing the facility as the “most automated packhouse in Australia”, Blanc said it had a number of unique features, including a highly automated pre-grader that can process up to 50 bins of mandarins an hour, automatic carton fillers and automatic ‘place packers’, where robots label the fruit in layers into cartons, with all labels positioned at the same point on top of the fruit for optimum presentation.
Gently does it
MAF Roda is very experienced in building soft citrus lines for projects all over the world, and the packing line is designed for gentle handling of the fruit. For instance, bin fillers allow fruit to travel from the bottom to the top, rather than being dropped from the top of the bin to the bottom.
“This facility also probably has the most gentle carton filler in the world, and it's much quicker, with the capacity to pack 2,400 cartons [of mandarins] per hour automatically,” said Blanc. “What is more you can track that box from the time it gets filled through to palletising”
Automatic palletising – not normally associated with citrus packhouses – is also a feature of the Seven Fields packhouse, which has five palletisers. “The pre-grading of fruit means that it can be palletised more effectively,” McMahon noted, “because we can select a long run of the same product and run it through the packing line and one palletiser.”
Meeting future demands
The Sunwest packhouse has the capacity to pre-grade 50 bins of mandarins per hour and 90 bins of oranges per hour, and it can pack 600 cartons of oranges per hour and 2,400 cartons of mandarins per hour.
Such capacity is designed to meet the future needs of the citrus industry in Australia, which will see a big influx in production of seedless mandarins over the coming years, particularly Aforuer.
With the Afourer variety being such a prolific and consistent bearer, Seven Fields’ export manager Brett Jackson said it was vital to have a system that could process and dispatch fruit very quickly and efficiently to markets.
Beyond the domestic market, Seven Fields’ main export destinations for the fruit currently include North America, the UK (where it expects to send around 60 containers this year), New Zealand and parts of Asia.
Seven Fields expects to pack just over 1m cartons of citrus at the facility during the current season, the vast majority of which will come from its own orchards. While that figure is well short of its facility’s 3m-carton capacity, Seven Fields will pack for growers in Sunraysia and other key growing regions such as the Riverland in the future.
