Blueberry packing house automates sorting after expansion

H&A Farms, a blueberry packing house located on the East Coast, handles fruit year-round for its own operations as well as both domestic and international growers.

During peak season, the company packs up to 136,000 kg per day across seven fresh-pack lines that run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

As business expanded, H&A turned to WECO’s advanced optical sorting technology to help deliver high-quality product while navigating labour shortages, tighter margins and evolving harvesting practices.

“Over the past several years, the bar for fresh-market blueberry quality has continued to climb, with consumers and retailers expecting more consistency in colour, size and overall appearance,” said Michael Hill, President of H&A Farms.

“Achieving those standards comes with its own challenges. For one, we’re handling more machine-harvested fruit each year due to increased labour costs, which brings more leaves, stems and cosmetic defects into the packing house and requires more intensive sorting. Additionally, labour remains difficult to find across the agricultural sector. We needed a way to keep pace with rising quality expectations while doing more with the people we already have.”

This combination of pressures led H&A to expand its reliance on optical sorting. Today, all seven of H&A’s fresh-pack lines utilise WECO equipment, including two built around WECO’s modular Sortivator solution.

Rather than a single fixed machine, Sortivator is a configurable platform that integrates multiple cleaning and inspection systems tailored to address each packer’s unique application.

The lines installed at H&A each include a blower to remove lightweight debris such as leaves and small stems, a BerryTek colour sorter to remove green or discoloured fruit and an Impulse soft sorter that removes soft or overripe berries.

Recently, H&A installed a new WECO 360Tek optical sorter at the end of one of its Sortivator lines to identify and remove fine defects and separate jumbo berries into a dedicated stream.

The product stream is conveyed over a series of hourglass-shaped rollers, presenting a 360-degree view of each berry to the digital colour cameras. Machine-learning algorithms analyse the images and trigger air nozzles to remove defective fruit.

“Before upgrading to the 360Tek, we needed as many as six workers per line to manually inspect the stream for fine defects. Even still, the reality is there’s only so much a person can catch when fruit is moving at that speed, no matter how skilled they are,” Hill said.

“The 360Tek improved defect removal while more than doubling our throughput. At the same time, it allowed us to eliminate the inspection table on that line and move those employees to other parts of our operation.”

The optical sorter has also become an important tool as demand for jumbo blueberries continues to grow. Different retail programs often call for different size grades, and H&A can adjust size specifications digitally on the 360Tek without mechanical modifications or change parts.

“One customer may want 18 millimetres and larger while another wants 20 millimetres and larger,” Hill explained. “Being able to quickly change those thresholds through the control system gives us a lot more flexibility and reduces downtime.”

Beyond inspection and sizing, H&A also uses data collected by its sorting systems to better understand varietal performance, defect trends and packout characteristics throughout the season.

“We can look at how a particular variety performs over time or how fruit from a certain block compares to others,” Hill said. “That helps us better predict packout, identify trends and make more informed decisions for future seasons.”

As blueberry growers and packers continue adapting to changing market conditions, Hill believes advanced automation and data-driven insights will play an increasingly important role in maintaining competitiveness.

“The industry isn’t getting any simpler,” he said. “Labour availability is always a challenge, customers expect exceptional product quality and everybody is looking for ways to operate more efficiently. Technology that helps us sort more accurately, increase throughput and better understand our fruit has become a very important part of our business.”

Image: Supplied