MILPITAS, CA - The results achieved during these years by several US Fruit and Vegetable Packing Houses thanks to UNITEC technologies have been constantly improving our satisfaction, gratification and trust in operating in terms of technological innovation which leads to concrete results for our Customers.

These results have been achieved particularly in California, Oregon and in the State of Washington, in which UNITEC, which is specialized in technologies for the processing and quality sorting of fruit, has been present with its branches for some years now, in order to be closer to its Customers.

UNITEC will be present again for the ninth time in a row this year at the PMA Fresh Summit Trade Event, scheduled at Orlando on October 19th and 20th, 2018, taking with them all the innovation and excellence of their technologies, which are able to produce important evolutionary changes in the processing operations of the Fruit and Vegetable Packing Houses.

Many US Packers have chosen the technologies from UNITEC in order to improve and maximize their production processes. Blueberry Vision from UNITEC has been also chosen by AC foods, a Fruit and Vegetable Packing House located in Oregon and California.

Blueberry Vision has enabled them to significantly improve the quality sorting processes of their blueberries.

"We’ve seen a lot of benefit working with UNITEC, particularly in terms of quality. We know a lot more of what’s happening with each berry that we sort. We see a lot of benefit from having this level of sorting detail and having benefit to our export business nowadays."

From Will Susich’s words, AC Foods Oregon Regional Manager, the result achieved clearly stands out: thanks to the extreme efficiency and reliability of the quality sorting, guaranteed by UNITEC technologies, AC foods have been able to improve their attractiveness, strengthen the trust of Consumers and therefore enter more demanding and rentable markets, even far away from their production and processing site.

Blueberry Vision is a highly innovating and performing technology, with very high-resolution “eyes” which scan 100 percent of each berry, in order to quality sort them according to several parameters: internal defects, external defects, shape defects, degree of softness, size, color, etc.

Will Susich clearly defines the evolution that the internal quality sorting from UNITEC Blueberry Vision technology has allowed them to achieve:

"We use a mix of hand and machine harvesting, but picking more with machines tends to be rougher on the fruit, and causes more bruising. As we machine pick more, we believe we need the best sorting technology to look for internal bruising. Having the UNITEC allows us to create benefit for our growers, our packing house, and for the business as a whole."

Thanks to the internal quality sorting achieved by using Blueberry Vision, AC foods can finally increase their mechanical picking for the products which are intended for fresh consumption, which allows them to have considerable labor savings and a consequent reduction of processing costs. The reliability of the quality sorting, therefore, adds to a significant increase of production efficiency, that is one of the benefits on which Will Susich has expressed greater satisfaction:

"One of the things we like the most about the UNITEC is its efficiency. We need very few people on the line during the sorting phase and that gives us a lot of potential to scale our operation up and down with the season."

Finally, Will Susich explained that Blueberry Vision technology has allowed AC foods to implement strategies of offer diversification. Thanks to the high number of quality sorting parameters which UNITEC technology enables to detect, Fruit and Vegetable Packing Houses can offer their end consumers berries with a level of quality which exactly meets their tastes and expectations as well as implement strategies of offer diversification, by dividing fruit according to different requirements regarding their conservation and distribution to different markets. Here his words:

"Sending only the berries that go into the fresh to the fresh, everything that is in the sort soft level to IQF and everything else to juice has a large economic benefit to us. We have a lot of more faith in the quality of the berries we are putting in the clamshells, and I feel we understand a lot more about which market they can end up to."

Not only AC foods have expressed its appreciation towards UNITEC and enthusiasm for the results which have been achieved, but they have also shown to have very, very clear ideas concerning the future:

"We know a lot of where we want to go—we want to be more efficient and we want to send only the best fruit into the market—and working with UNITEC is a big part of making that a reality."

Thanks to Blueberry Vision from UNITEC, important results have been achieved:

• higher reliability in the quality sorting
• processing cost reduction and production efficiency increase
• opportunity of offer diversification
• competitive advantage achievement and durability over time.

The same results have also been achieved in other countries which present greater blueberry production, among them Chile, Argentina, Peru, South Africa, Spain, and Poland.

UNITEC