TOMRA: Modern sorting makes tomato industry more competitive

"Tomatoes are one of life’s blessings. For growers, tomatoes give a high yield and are in strong demand. For consumers, tomatoes are packed with healthy antioxidants, nutrients, and vitamins. For processed food manufacturers, tomatoes add color, flavour, and natural goodness to juices, pastes, purees, sauces, and ketchup. And for food processing lines, tomatoes are a swelling revenue stream.  

But after counting the blessings, let’s pause for a reality check. While global demand for tomatoes is increasing, so are the pressures they bring to processing lines. There’s an urgent need to sort, grade, process and pack ever-greater volumes of tomatoes and tomato products during the short harvesting season without letting standards slip. And at the same time as striving to increase throughputs, processors must also maintain or improve food safety and product quality – brand reputations depend on it. 
The booming popularity of tomatoes has led to the global production of approximately 190 million tonnes yearly, occupying some five million hectares of land. And when market researchers look ahead to the next five years, they see that the global sales of fresh and processed tomatoes will keep increasing at a compound annual growth rate of about 4-6%.
In the years since tomatoes first became a widely sold food product, the key processing tasks of sorting, grading, and packing tomatoes and processed products have become much more complex. The introduction of new tomato varieties has brought a far greater range of differences in the fruit’s color, size, and shape. Processors, retailers and consumers have raised their quality expectations to previously unobtainable levels. Yet two crucial measures of quality, firmness and Brix content, remain hidden from the human eye or cameras, and if the crop is not properly processed at any stage of processing, all quality can be lost.

Dealing with these challenges might sound like a mission impossible – but a century since processing solutions kick-started the tomato industry, now they are helping it expand internationally by enabling processors to meet tougher market demands. Today’s state-of-the-art technologies empower tomato processors to increase throughput, reduce food waste, improve product quality, meet product specifications, maximize packout, reduce the problems associated with dependence on manual labor, and improve profitability. 
For many years now, the standard-setter in optical sorting and grading technologies for the food industry has been TOMRA Food. In the last five years, TOMRA has broadened its offering by acquiring BBC Technologies and Compac, so it is now the leading provider of integrated post-harvest-to-pack solutions. These take care of everything from unloading fruit onto the line, and are well suited for tomatoes.
TOMRA’s mission with tomatoes, as with other food categories, is to lead the resource revolution in a world where every piece of food counts. All the sorting and grading technologies are calibrated to each individual line’s needs. Through many years of experience working with processors and packhouses, TOMRA’s engineers have acquired a deep understanding of customers’ operational challenges and how to solve them. Customer-centricity is at the heart of everything TOMRA does, matching world-class technical expertise with an unrivaled global reach to provide local-level service and support.  

A wide range of sorting equipment is offered by TOMRA both for large fruits and for smaller ones intended for packaging, which allow grading according to weight, size, shape, density, color, defects, etc.
Specific devices, such as Spectrim, first sort by surface imperfections, then classify minor and major defects, including skin blemishes, insect damage, misshapen fruit, bruises, abrasions and candy. Sorting parameters can be configured to classify different levels of defects, so that there is full control when matching product qualities in different markets.

Unfortunately, however, the skin of the fruit doesn’t tell its whole story. As we mentioned when referring to Brix and firmness, some crucial quality characteristics are hidden within. For this reason, TOMRA offers Inspectra², a non-invasive solution for internal defect grading. This platform’s near-infrared spectrometer can detect Brix, core rot, dry matter and firmness. These detection capabilities keep bad tomatoes out of a "good box" and reduce fruit giveaway.”

Source: Tomra