Blueberry sorting lines for a farm in France
This project was prepared for a French farm specialising in raspberry and blueberry production. With an area of 55 ha and a blueberry harvest of around 350 tonnes, the customer needed a solution that would allow a large quantity of fruit to be sorted efficiently during the season.
A blueberry sorting line adapted to a farm with large-scale production.
Country of installation: France
The farm produces soft fruit on an area of 55 ha and mainly grows raspberries and blueberries. With a blueberry harvest of around 350 tonnes per season, manual selection becomes a major organisational and cost burden. The key requirement was therefore to implement a solution that would speed up sorting, reduce the share of manual labour and maintain repeatable fruit quality for sale.
The customer also analysed competing American machines, but the available solutions were not well matched to the required capacity of the farm and involved a significantly higher investment cost. For this scale of production, the Green Sort line was a more rational choice: it made it possible to achieve the required capacity, maintain control over sorting quality and keep the investment at an economically justified level.
The line was selected for working with large quantities of fruit within a short seasonal period. In these conditions, not only sorting accuracy is important, but also stable fruit feeding, convenient operation and the ability to work for many hours a day without excessively increasing the number of people at the line.
The vision system analyses the fruit according to the set quality parameters, helping to separate blueberries that do not meet commercial requirements. This allows the farm to prepare fruit batches more quickly for further sale or packing.
After commissioning the first line and testing it in daily operation, the customer decided to order another machine. The second line makes it possible to distribute the workload more effectively during the season, increase sorting throughput and reduce the risk of a bottleneck after harvest.
For a farm of this size, it was an investment well suited to the scale of production. Compared with more expensive competing solutions, it provided the required functionality with a shorter payback time and a better fit to the customer’s real needs.
The project in France shows that automating blueberry sorting can be particularly justified on farms that need to sort a large quantity of fruit in a short time. With production reaching hundreds of tonnes per season, a properly selected line helps reduce dependence on manual selection, improve work organisation and prepare fruit for sale more quickly. The order of another machine by the same customer confirmed that the solution worked well in practice and was matched to the scale of the farm.