With a new year comes a host of new innovations for the fresh produce industry and 2013 looks set to take that a stage further.

Taking machinery to levels that sci-fi fans would be proud of, Spanish retailer Mercadona has commissioned intralogistics automation specialist Cimcorp to design and implement order-picking robots specifically for fresh fruit and vegetables.

The robot technology, which will start operation once the construction of a new Mercadona logistics building is finished at the end of 2013, could be crucial for the future of retail, according to Cimcorp.

'Due to very fast order processing with Cimcorp's robots, our customers in retail and food and beverage are able to shorten lead times, which is a critical factor for perishable products with limited shelf lives,' states Markku Vesa, CEO of Cimcorp Oy.

On the machinery side, Dutch firm Abracad Technoworks is pioneering high-speed counting technology for fruit and vegetable producers. Abracad's counting and boxing unit, which was nominated for the Innovation Award at this year's Fruit Logistica exhibition in Berlin, counts and then precision fills cartons with small bags of fruit, and the machinery is already being used by Fresh Express, which supplies US McDonald's restaurants with apple slices for children.

'We started 50 years ago able to fill 40 bags into a tray per minute; now we are up to 480 and the plan is to get that higher and higher to provide fresh produce companies with groundbreaking speed and efficiency,' says Abracad's MD Egbert Nillesen.

In terms of packaging, UK firm Sirane says it has found the 'holy grail' in the fight to extend the shelf-life of perishables after launching its Dri-fresh Resolve 'Safe-hold' fruit cushioning pads at this year's Fruit Logistica. The pads are designed to protect soft fruit from bruising while the integrated ethylene absorbing properties help to extend shelf life by up to five days.

'Shelf-life extension is the holy grail for a large fruit and vegetable industry. A huge amount of produce is wasted because it goes off before it is eaten,' says MD Simon Balderson.

'Using our absorbent pads and Sira-Flex Resolve film could reduce the amount of food waste and significantly reduce costs. We can also make it more likely that the consumer will get a quality product in good condition.'

Elsewhere US company PakSense is leading the way in temperature-monitoring technology. The firm's PakSense Ultra Contact Labels, which are about the same size as a stamp, digitally record the time and temperature of the environment during distribution or storage, and send back live data so suppliers can check if anything is wrong.

'When fresh produce exports arrive damaged or rotten it can be hard to pinpoint what exactly has gone wrong, but because the labels provide incredible live insight into what is happening to a product during distribution, suppliers can plan ahead,' says Andreas Stoll of PakSense.

Finally, and perhaps most futuristically, Professor Simon Blackmore, head of engineering at Harper Adams and MD of Unibots Ltd, has been discussing precision farming and the role mechanisation can play in modern farming. He has touted the benefits of robots to cultivation, scouting, crop care and harvesting. One of the most eye-catching piece of technology is the third generation crop scout, dubbed 'Scamp', which features the ability to carry out weed and crop mapping with machine vision, crop nutrient status through multi-spectral response and autonomous phenotyping and 3D canopy models, among many other things.

He says such systems are ready to be developed and commercialised in the UK. The future could be now. —