The 5S Blueberry is designed to deliver new levels of precision, fruit protection and packhouse efficiency
Tomra Food has launched the 5S Blueberry sorting and grading platform powered by Spectrim with LUCAi for the Australia and New Zealand markets at Hort Connections.
Designed specifically for the delicate nature of blueberries, the 5S Blueberry responds to increasing industry demands for higher quality standards, greater consistency and improved operational performance across packhouses.
“Across Australia and New Zealand, growers and packers are looking for better bloom retention, gentler handling and more consistent grading outcomes,” said Tomra Food senior product manager, Troy Cleaver.
“The 5S Blueberry is designed to protect the natural integrity of the fruit while giving operators far greater control over the grading process.”
From infeed through to discharge, the 5S Blueberry has been engineered to minimise impact, pressure and drop heights, supporting improved bloom retention and overall fruit quality.
At the core of the platform is Spectrim with LUCAi, Tomra’s advanced vision and deep learning technology, enabling more accurate defect detection and classification. This allows packhouses to make clearer, data-driven decisions about fruit quality, ultimately improving packout and maximising value.
The system delivers strong first-pass accuracy, helping reduce rehandling while maintaining consistent grading performance across varying fruit conditions.
“There is no black box,” Cleaver said. “This is built on decades of understanding what drives value in blueberries and making those insights accessible and actionable for packhouse operators.”
With increasing variability in fruit quality driven by environmental conditions, alongside tighter retailer and export specifications, packhouses are under pressure to deliver both throughput and precision.
The 5S Blueberry is designed for year-round performance, with features including dehydration detection; precision grading and sorting; dynamic operator feedback; high throughput capability; gentle handling and bloom preservation; and intuitive, adaptable user interface.
The platform also integrates with Tomra Food’s broader post-harvest solutions, enabling packhouses to implement fully connected blueberry processing lines through a single supplier.
The solution, alongside Tomra’s latest innovations in AI-driven sorting and grading, will be showcased to the Australian and New Zealand industry at Hort Connections 2026 in Adelaide.
