Melbourne-headquartered GP Graders has announced that it has entered into a technology partnership with Ellips of Holland that the company says could revolutionise the ability for apple packers to identify apples with internal defects.
According to GP Graders, the move will allow companies to to meet increasing supermarket demands which are 'crippling the industry'.
“This cutting-edge technology will change the industry, and strengthen the packers ability to provide defect free apples to supermarkets,” said Stuart Payne, managing director of GP Graders.
The system uses light spectrometer technology and takes ten images sliced across each apple to detect internal browning and core rot wherever it is located in the fruit.
According to the grou, the technology doesn’t just shoot a beam of light through the centre of the apple to look at the core in isolation, but it also analyses the entire mass of the apple, slicing the apple at ten incremental stages in order to check for internal rot or browning wherever it is located through the fruit - older technology only took one light image through the centre of an apple.
Ellipschief executive Erwin Baker oversaw the installation operating first hand at GP Graders’ head office in Melbourne, Australia, where the technology has been fitted to an operating apple line.
Bins of apples were run through the system allowing GP Graders to intensively test and demonstrate the technology. “The results were remarkable,” said Payne.
Of those apples discarded to an exit with a reading of internal browning and core rot, 100 per cent of them showed those characteristics when cut open.
Meanwhile, of those apples that were deemed not to have a reading of internal or core rot, only one single apple showed specific characteristics when cut into during the collation of test results. The total sample size was 1,500 apples.
