State of the Art Potato Sorting Technology

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Headquartered out of Walla Walla Key Technology designs, manufactures and markets process automations systems for food and other industries. Their Optyx digital sorter with camera/laser technology was recently chosen by Tayto, Britain's largest potato chip manufacturer. Key Technology's John Kadinger says that the Optyx's combination camera/laser sorter technology is far better at identifying and removing the widest variety of defects and foreign material. Beyond that the Optyx digital sorters also provide manufacturers with production flexibility, by allowing them to sort two different products simultaneously.

KADINGER: Even though it's one machine the cameras and the technology - the computers behind it - are able to identify those lanes, if you will, so they can run two products at the same time over the same machine. We've developed specialized application software for our system so they can load that specific key ware into whichever camera or laser for that particular product for that particular lane. Most customers have just one product in running, or they'll run what we call a recycle loop.

In addition Kadinger says the consistent reliability of Optyx enables manufacturers to optimize labor.

KADINGER: A laser/camera sorter is much more efficient; there's no judgements from a person. It's based on the characteristics that we've set in the system, and they can adjust those characteristics as needed. But it's very, very accurate in terms of removing the defects.

So accurate in fact that Tayto's in-house technical inspection team reports that they've seen a marked improvement in the quality of their product since they installed the new Optyx sorters from Key Technology.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray with the Ag Information Network of the West.