The TOMRA 5B optical sorter has helped this well-established family business achieve a 16-fold increase in throughput, as well as improving the removal of foreign materials and defective product, and reducing reliance on hard-to-find manual labor.
McCall Farms has been growing and canning vegetables in South Carolina since 1954. Recently, and in a surprisingly short span of time, this company has increased production volumes 16-fold.
In the years up to and including 2018, McCall Farms produced an average of 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.
Previously, sorting was slow and uneven
McCall Farms has come a long way since, a family business with a 2000-acre farm, it switched from growing tobacco to canning vegetables.
This move has proved very positive for the company’s health: today, McCall Farms is one of the leading U.S. producers of farm-fresh canned vegetables and fruits, producing 235 different products at its 93,000-square-meter facility in Effingham, South Carolina.
McCall Farms’ wide variety of products are sold under four well-known brands across the country. The company, which employs more than 1,000 people, had decided to switch from manual to automated sorting because of the difficulty of finding and keeping staff by purchasing competitive sorters.
Amanda Salisbury, the U.S. firm’s maintenance manager, recounts, “Those machines did not have the performance that distinguishes an optical sorter. This made us vulnerable and we tried to supplement with manual sorting. Since we could not always find enough operators, we had to help mechanics and clerks. To facilitate optimal product sorting, we had to slow down production and discard batches that we could not clean up sufficiently.”
This was not acceptable. In addition, McCall Farms has always aimed for high product quality. “Whether it’s green beans, sweet potatoes, spinach or peanuts,” says Amanda, “our main goal is always quality. That means we needed consistently effective selection. We want to eliminate critical contamination from foreign bodies, and we want to achieve the same high-quality results even when changing the fresh product.”
The company had the answer since it owned two Sentinel II optical sorters from TOMRA that worked well. Now, something more was needed to handle larger quantities with even higher product quality. With advice from TOMRA’s experts, the best solution for the context was quickly identified: the TOMRA 5B.
Quantity, quality and ease of maintenance
The TOMRA 5B is the top-of-the-line belt sorter for green beans, as well as many other products. By combining the latest sensor technology with advanced shape algorithms, this machine can reach the most challenging quality targets and yields. Its innovative 360° inspection, with smart surround view technology, boosts product quality and guarantees swift removal of foreign material, resulting in a highly efficient sorting process. And its flexibility and accuracy are complemented by gentle handling.
Amanda Salisbury recalls : “The performance difference of TOMRA’s sorters compared to the others we had is staggering. It is a delight to watch them perform. We achieved results that exceeded expectations: a 99 percent removal rate for all defects at TOMRA’s recommended capacity. With a 16-fold increase in production in just four years.”
Planning to buy another
In addition to the two Sentinel II sorters and single TOMRA 5B currently sorting fresh-cut green beans for canning, McCall Farms’ Effingham plant now also uses two TOMRA Nimbus BSI+ sorters – with TOMRA’s unique Biometric Signature Identification technology to detect both the color and chemical composition of objects – for in-shell peanuts. And the business is so impressed with its first TOMRA 5B, it plans to buy another.
