New start in innovation and robotisation thanks to GearPerfomer
At Frestia, the emphasis is on taste, innovation and customer-oriented thinking. We are constantly looking for new insights and developments to improve the quality of our product and optimise the growing process. The GearPerformer from Gearbox is the perfect fit for this, we see the Performer as the beginning of a new start in innovation and robotisation in the company.
But what is and does the GearPerformer do?
We expect the GearPerformer to anticipate (future) issues like labour savings, quality improvement and customer-specific requirements even better. The GearPerformer is deployed in the quality assessment of snack peppers. Over 300 sweet peppers per minute pass over the conveyor belt to be selected out for quality. Until recently, the snack pepper went through the eyes of two people. With this volume, it is not always possible to 100 per cent pick out all products that do not meet quality standards. In addition, staff availability is becoming an increasing challenge.
The question arose: what can robotisation mean for business process optimisation and what can we do with it with the product. We started looking for a good partner and ended up at Gearbox. We sat down together to see what the new machine should look like and what requirements it should meet. The process from concept idea to delivery took about a year and a half.
By bringing together camera technology, smart AI software and robotics, the machine is able to assess the quality of the product on all sides and sort out the peppers that do not meet the requirements. We get real-time insight into the quality of a batch through a reporting tool. We are working with Gearbox in the coming period to fine-tune the machine to quality requirements: it is getting smarter and better every day.
A source of data
A nice bonus is that the GearPerformer generates a huge amount of data, which can be used to optimise business processes in the greenhouse. The device gives us a source of new insights of things we didn't have such an explicit view of before. We now know exactly what the characteristics of a batch are and what percentage snack peppers has what length. We can also monitor breed characteristics better.
In addition, we can now manage even more at customer level, not only in terms of quality, but also in terms of customer requirements. "Suppose we sort the snack peppers to a certain size. Peppers that are too small or too large are then automatically taken out. We can then use this to introduce a new segment to the market. We want to differentiate more towards our customers.
Read our entire interview with Gearbox
