The Tomra 5B optical sorter has helped this family business achieve a 16-fold increase in throughput, improved the removal of foreign materials and defective product, and reduced reliance on hard-to-find manual labor.
McCall Farms has been growing and canning vegetables in South Carolina, USA, since 1954. Still, it was in an astonishingly short timeframe, and very recently, that this 70-year-old business ramped up production volumes 16-fold. Garlic Sorting Machine
In the years up to and including 2018, McCall Farms typically produced 18 million cans of green beans per year. By 2022, however, McCall’s output had skyrocketed to 304 million cans per year. A big reason for this giant leap forward was McCall's acquisition of a state-of-the-art Tomra 5B optical sorting machine. Investing in the sorter has also paid back by significantly enhancing product quality and reducing problematic dependence on manual labor.
McCall Farms’ first move was to acquire sorting machines for its green beans, fresh cut for canning, from a manufacturer other than Tomra. But this brought disappointment. Amanda said: “Those machines didn’t perform at the level we expected of an optical sorter. This left us vulnerable and scrambling to make up the difference with hand-sorters. Because we couldn’t always find enough hand sorters, we had mechanics and managers helping with the sorting. To facilitate optimal sorting of the product, we had to slow down production and had to reject loads that we couldn’t clean up sufficiently by hand.” None of this was acceptable, of course. For one thing, food waste costs money. For another, McCall Farms has always set itself the goal of high product quality. “Whether it’s green beans or sweet potatoes or spinach or peanuts,” Amanda says, “our main goal is always quality. We want to offer the highest quality product on the market. This means we need consistency in our sorting. We want to eliminate critical FM [foreign material] contamination and we want the same high-quality results even when the raw product changes.”
It was clear to the Effingham plant’s managers and line operators that a more effective sorting solution was needed – and that perhaps the answer was staring them in the face, because the plant’s two Tomra Sentinel II optical sorting machines were working well. The Sentinel II is a cost-efficient machine, simple to operate and maintain, which outperforms similarly-priced competitors in sorting ability, capacity, and durability – but now McCall Farms wanted something more, to handle greater quantities with even greater product quality. Discussions with Tomra’s experts quickly identified that the best solution would be the Tomra 5B.
For more information: TOMRA Food Research Park Haasrode 1622 Romestraat 20 3001 Leuven - Belgium Tel: +32 16 396 396 www.tomra.com/food
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