An eight-station packhouse system from Marco is playing a pivotal role at soft-fruit grower Village Nurseries Ltd in Keyingham, East Yorkshire.
The Marco system is part of a major £500,000 investment by business, which has seen Village Nurseries Ltd changeover from growing predominantly cucumbers to producing soft fruit in less than nine months and win the Yorkshire Post’s ‘Growers Award’ for its Tulameen raspberries.
Soaring energy costs to heat the massive 10 acres of greenhouses made the company rethink its operation and the decision was made to switch over to less energy consuming crops. By sacrificing part of the cucumber crop in 2006, Village Nurseries now grows award-winning raspberries and strawberries for major supermarkets.
The Marco Packhouse system, which is a module within Village Nurseries’ TRAC-IT MES solution, is an integral part of the packing line, consisting of LineMaster workstations, conveyors and labellers.
The easy-to-use Marco LineMaster workstations are specifically designed for fast efficient packing. The LineMaster operators take individual pre-packed punnets and place them one at a time on the integral scales. The LineMaster’s coloured bar graph then gives a clear indication of whether the pack is over, under or within weight tolerance. The operators now add or remove fruits to achieve the correct target weight. The LineMaster system features Marco’s innovative Automatic Optimisation (AO) software, which has been specifically developed to maximise the use of real time data capture in high-speed manual packing and portion control applications.
“In order to be competitive in this fast-moving industry, we knew we had to invest in the latest technology,” said Graham Clark, Village Nurseries Ltd’s managing director. “The Marco equipment is an invaluable part of our operation and the operators need minimal training. In fact it is so efficient, we are now considering looking for contract packing to make best use of its capabilities. The system provides us with important data to ensure we continue to be efficient and we look forward to winning more awards for our fruit in 2008.”
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