Nut company meets demand for quality with digital sorter

When Morada Nut Company was selecting equipment for its new state-of-the-art walnut shelling plant, it searched for a digital sorter that would help it produce the highest quality product on a consistent basis.

“We wanted to identify the tool that would serve us best in getting our product into high-end markets like Japan, Korea and Germany. We wanted to achieve the highest specifications for FM, defects and colour,” said Scott Brown, production manager at Morada.

Morada chose Key Technology’s Taurys laser sorter, which is designed to remove foreign material (FM) and defects from the product and colour sort for grading.

Taurys is a high-performance, chute-fed laser sorter. It can be configured with a wide range of detection wavelengths to sort on the colour and/or structural properties of a wide variety of nuts as well as dried fruit, frozen fruits and vegetables, fresh-cut produce, confections, coffee and snack foods.

Featuring a 1200 mm inspection zone, Taurys sorts up to 4.5 metric tons of walnuts per hour.

Morada typically runs a standard double pass through Taurys. The first pass removes shells and other FM as well as defects such as shrivelled kernels. The second pass is fine tuned to colour sort for grading purposes.

“Taurys has the flexibility to perform both types of sorts with performance at the top of the industry,” said Brown. “It’s amazing in its ability to remove shells and other FM and colour sort. It’s a very impressive sorter.”

Taurys’s settings can be stored and retrieved for fast changeovers. The icon-based graphical user interface (GUI) is easy to learn and use, which reduces training and simplifies operations.

“It’s very effective at eliminating even the smallest membrane without producing too many false rejects. Part of that success is a result of the sorter’s ease of use. It’s easy to get Taurys to perform the way we need it to,” said Brown.