Last week my colleague Tim Marshall bit into a perfectly good looking apple and found the internal browning in the image above - he came straight to me as inspection systems product manager to complain about his negative eating experience. Tim, like most consumers, made his initial purchase based on the exterior appearance and feel of the apple. Having had a bad experience, he's unlikely to buy this brand again.
At Compac we specialize in providing packhouses with state-of-the-art grading and sorting technology to ensure the right quality produce goes to the right consumer.
Enticing consumers to return to a brand means more than presenting a good-looking product. Customers make repeat purchases based on the eating experience – namely, the quality of the produce’s interior and taste.
Compac revolutionized the fresh produce sorting industry after releasing Taste-Tech in 1999. The innovative system uses a safe, non-invasive, near-infrared (NIR) technology to check the internal integrity of produce.
Ensuring customers have the best technology available, Compac developed an improved internal inspection system for fresh produce called Inspectra2, which was launched at Fruit Logistica 2018 in February.
Combined with external grading platform Spectrim, Inspectra2 offers
packhouses the ability to consistently and accurately grade both external and internal characteristics of fresh produce including apples, citrus, kiwifruit and avocados at full production speed.
Consistency is key
Detecting internal defects in fruit provides packhouses with confidence that the product being shipped is of the highest quality. This ensures a consistent eating experience.
The major focus of Inspectra2 has been on operational performance. By significantly reducing the amount of training the system requires, operators will be able to better monitor and tailor Inspectra2 to match the fruit conditions day-to-day, batch-to-batch, and season-to-season.
Read more: Quality and consistency of packed produce is number one for the packhouse
By simultaneously improving the speed of sorting and defect detection, more fruit can be sorted at any given time to improve the yield and increase the number of produce packed into each box for shipping.
For example, watercore is a disorder that results in apple interiors taking on a glassy appearance late into maturity. Consumers are divided on this issue – some markets see watercore apples as premium due to their sweet taste, while others see watercore as a defect.
Using a system like Inspectra2 gives packhouses the option to separate these apples and provide consumers with the produce of their preference, reducing the amount of food wastage and maximizing yields and profits.
Read more: Technology sorting things out - H.H. Dobbins armed to become world leading packers again
Streamlined sorting solutions
Inspectra2 also features a new, more user-friendly user interface to help streamline the systems use in packhouses worldwide and enable operators to access more of the 
technology’s capability. All these changes have been made to ensure Compac remains at the forefront of fresh produce grading and sorting solutions, future proofing the packhouse and improving the yield from the field.
If you have a bad batch of produce, you can use systems like Inspectra2 to do a deep dive and recover any quality fruit rather than throwing out the entire batch – minimizing waste and improving the overall output of produce.
Maximizing yields and providing the highest quality eating experience to consumers is at the heart of Compac sorting solutions. Your brand is only as good as the product you ship, so using the best technology available to ensure everything that leaves the packhouse is of top quality will do wonders for protecting and enhancing your business.
