BBC Technologies has extended its CURO filling system range with the new CURO-2 compact system for fruits under 40mm diameter, primarily focusing on the blueberry, cherry and snacking tomato markets.
The company claims the CURO-2, which can pack up to 700kg of fruit per hour, takes flexibility to a new level by providing a solution for packing small volumes of different grades of fruit simultaneously – useful for premium products – or complementing bigger CURO-platforms to supplement capacity if required.
It has the same versatility as the bigger CURO-16 and the same efficiency in switching between different sized packing options such as clamshells, punnets and boxes, while also retaining the accuracy, gentle handling, and simple and easy-to-use interface of the larger system.
“We developed CURO-2 because we wanted to increase further the flexibility and granularity of the CURO platform,” said CEO Geoff Furniss.
“We are seeing a significant shift in the market, with our customers being increasingly required to divide their fruit into multiple tiers and needing to pack different grades of product simultaneously.
“The CURO-2 provides the solution for packing our customers’ niche products once they have been graded, as well as providing them with additional capacity when needed.
“At BBC Technologies we have a track record for working closely with our customers and continually evolving and adapting our offering to suit their individual needs, and this is exactly what happened with this new product.”
The CURO-2 system was developed to meet the requirements of customers such as South Africa based Blue Mountain Berries, which supplies blueberries to Europe, Asia and Russia.
The company recently upgraded the automatisation of its packing plant with the addition of a full turnkey KATO 260 precision grading line and a CURO-2 filling system.
“We worked out a KATO 260 configuration with seven exits: one with a CURO-12, which processes the majority of our product; one with the CURO-2, which we use to pack a grade that is about 20 per cent of our product; two exits with hand fillers for our smaller fruit and local product; on two exits we split our frozen fruit into two categories, small and large; and finally we have one waste exit,” explained managing director Chrisleo Botha.
“The whole configuration fits our business well and we can do everything we want to do on one run. The CURO-2 allowed us to utilise Fill-by-Weight functionality on smaller niche volumes of fruit that we were previously having to pack by hand.”
Botha said the upgrade had raised the company’s productivity, improved quality by reducing human handling and errors, and increased accuracy by reducing the fruit give-away.
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