OPAC
New Zealand
Project brief was to replace a 20yr old 8x lane 32drop sizer with 10 obsolete box fillers. OPAC needed to invest in a higher capacity sizer and packing line to accommodate increasing volumes of Gold coming into production and the existing equipment assets were nearing end of functional and practical life.
10 Lane presize and 8 Lane packing line with automatic bin sanitizing, 12 automated box fillers with lidding stations and full traceability system. The line features an additional 36 packing outlets for manual tray and box filling.
Due to the small 15 Bushell bin used by OPAC, a MAF Roda de-stacker and continuous bin tip was built to deliver 100x bins per hour. Empty bins are transported on overhead conveyors to the outside of the building to be sanitized and re-stacked by two DIR robots. Fruit is then accumulated using an automatic FIFO system to maintain even filling and lane distribution with a large brush unit installed to remove debris and kiwifruit dust.
The MAF Roda Pomone 10 lane pre-grading sizer and 8 lane packing line is designed to maximise the cup fill on the packing sizer by sizing, sorting and grading out 2nd grade, soft, blemished, mis-shaped, low dry matter or reject fruit. This means only 1st grade fruit meeting Zespri’s high quality standards is delivered to the packouts. 2nd grade fruit is packed on a 2 lane Uniway sizer online or it can be bin filled for packing at a later time.
The packline uses Insight II NIR technology to grade internally for dry matter and Global Scan 6 with softness scan 2 for external grading. To compliment the camera system there are grading tables available to have the fruit inspected by staff if required.
OPAC selected 12 automatic box fillers to pack both Green and Gold varieties into bulk boxes. This allows the production on fast moving sizes to be optimized and creates flexibility on the manual packing stations. The box filling system tracks and traces the contents of each box and applies the final shipping label including all grower, orchard, variety, size, maturity data and pallet ID no# to comply with the requirements set by Zespri. The line is capable of 8000 trays per hour and over 4100 pieces of fruit per minute of 1st Grade Kiwifruit.
10 Lane presize and 8 Lane packing line with automatic bin sanitizing, 12 automated box fillers with lidding stations and full traceability system. The line features an additional 36 packing outlets for manual tray and box filling.
Due to the small 15 Bushell bin used by OPAC, a MAF Roda de-stacker and continuous bin tip was built to deliver 100x bins per hour. Empty bins are transported on overhead conveyors to the outside of the building to be sanitized and re-stacked by two DIR robots. Fruit is then accumulated using an automatic FIFO system to maintain even filling and lane distribution with a large brush unit installed to remove debris and kiwifruit dust.
The MAF Roda Pomone 10 lane pre-grading sizer and 8 lane packing line is designed to maximise the cup fill on the packing sizer by sizing, sorting and grading out 2nd grade, soft, blemished, mis-shaped, low dry matter or reject fruit. This means only 1st grade fruit meeting Zespri’s high quality standards is delivered to the packouts. 2nd grade fruit is packed on a 2 lane Uniway sizer online or it can be bin filled for packing at a later time.
The packline uses Insight II NIR technology to grade internally for dry matter and Global Scan 6 with softness scan 2 for external grading. To compliment the camera system there are grading tables available to have the fruit inspected by staff if required.
OPAC selected 12 automatic box fillers to pack both Green and Gold varieties into bulk boxes. This allows the production on fast moving sizes to be optimized and creates flexibility on the manual packing stations. The box filling system tracks and traces the contents of each box and applies the final shipping label including all grower, orchard, variety, size, maturity data and pallet ID no# to comply with the requirements set by Zespri. The line is capable of 8000 trays per hour and over 4100 pieces of fruit per minute of 1st Grade Kiwifruit.
