Sorting the kiwifruit pays off

By ELLEN READ

Twenty years after Hamish Kennedy developed his first fruit sorting machine in the garage of his parents' Northland kiwifruit farm, his company has become a world leader in the technology.

And that success is largely due to a serious commitment to research and development, says marketing manager James Flocchini.

Ploughing 20 per cent of revenue back into R&D had helped Compac Sorting Equipment to stay one step ahead of the competition, he said.

Kennedy founded the company in 1984, having identified a gap in the market for accurate, high-speed sorting machines.

After studying electrical engineering at Auckland University, he went to work on his family's kiwifruit orchard in Kerikeri and decided he could devise a better way to sort the fruit.

He built his first machine in a garage. The neighbours saw it and wanted one, and so the business began.

The company designs and builds machines to weigh and sort fruit and vegetables, using software, computers, electronics and video cameras.

Produce is rotated as it passes a video camera, which takes multiple images to determine the diameter, shape, density and colour of the item. The weight of each item is also recorded - 250 times in a tenth of a second - and analysed to give a accuracy better than one gram.

Once the fruit or vegetable has been weighed and photographed, it can then be diverted to the appropriate sorting stream.

The company claims its machines are the fastest in the world, handling between 10 and 15 pieces of fruit or vegetables a second in each lane.

This means a 12-lane machine could sort more than 100 pieces a second.

Compac's first export order came in 1991, when an eight-lane sorter was installed for the largest kiwifruit packer in France.

The firm made its mark in the United States eight years later when a Compac machine was used to salvage what was left of a frost-damaged Californian orange harvest.

Other companies' sorting methods were not accurate enough, but Compac's technology could tell which oranges were damaged by measuring their density, meaning less fruit was discarded as waste.

In 2000, the company developed technology for blemish grading, frost sorting and sugar testing, as well as improving its software for colour and weight sorting.

Compac now has machines round the world, including Australia, Asia, South America, South Africa and Europe.

Last year, the company beat international competition to win an order to supply Californian fruit-packer Gerawan Farming with automated sorting, grading and packing machinery and software able to handle the company's requirement of 6000 boxes an hour.

Company president Dan Gerawan admits he was initially wary of dealing with a firm so far away, fearing it might not be as accessible or knowledgeable as US suppliers.

"We were wrong. The company was willing to agree to a local inventory and on-site service," he said.

Flocchini said Compac's New Zealand location was one of its advantages.

Costs were far lower here. He doubted that the company could afford top research and development staff at US rates.

But dealing mainly with overseas customers does give the company foreign exchange challenges.

The New Zealand dollar has moved dramatically against the greenback over the past year or so, and the US is Compac's largest single market.

Local business is between 10 and 20 per cent of turnover.

"We've made a slow entrance into overseas markets because we wanted to make sure we've got the right distributors and systems in place," Flocchini said.

Tomatoes are also big business for Compac, and its technology features strongly in the competitive US market.

In August, the company won an order for two tomato packaging units in Chicago and Pennsylvania - taking the number of machines the company has operating in the US tomato market to 18.


Flocchini said a major advantage for the company was that it had clever people working for it at the top who saw opportunities and went after them.

Staff were involved in weekly strategy meetings, ensuring time was spent on planning and preparation.

The company's approach was not to sell its equipment solely on price, but to consider added-value capabilities.

"Compac has made a bigger commitment to R&D on a longer-term basis than our competitors," Flocchini said.

"That's given us the edge and taken us from being nobody in the international market to being well known."