Happy Farm Friday! Today, grower Clay Gebbers shows us the technology used to gently and precisely handle cherries after they’ve been picked.🍒 There are an incredible number of decisions being made on a single cherry to delicately bring it from tree to box!🍒☀️
Video Transcript:
“Hey guys, it’s July 15th. We’re almost at that halfway point and I want to take you into the warehouse to check out all the decisions they’re making. It actually blows my mind, so let’s go in there. I’ll introduce you to my cousin Clay and we’ll just check the whole process out. Let’s go.
Hey, I’m Clay Gebbers, welcome to the packing line. We just got the bins in from the orchard. We’ll do a quick hydrocooling, bring the temperature down before they head in to get packed. When the bins are received we’ll put them through 37 degree water to bring the temperature down for about five minutes. It can take about 20 degrees out of the temperature of the cherries. Holding in these cold rooms separated by date, grower, variety.
Kept cold before they go on to our packing line. Our packing line was all developed around gentle packing practices starting with dumping the cherries into water so that they can gently come up the belt where they’ll go up and the team will separate the cherries. So they’ll come in clusters from the field and for us to sort them. We have to have every cherry separated as its own individual cherry. Now all of our cherries are separated by their stem so at this point we’ll try to singulate them out. We’ll stretch them out in single file lines so that when they go underneath our cameras we can look at each cherry on its own. So as the cherry goes under our cameras the computer will roll it backwards, align the stem, then roll it sideways, and as it goes under that camera it’ll take 27 pictures as that cherry rolls over. And we’ll look at it from the stem side, the bottom side, and all around the top to make sure we can get all the quality photos we need. After the computer is lifting each cherry it remembers the cup that those cherries are in and as they come down the line we’ll use air and we’ll use water to put those cherries in the right drop. This is the final stage of our production line before the cherries go in a box. They’re being super cooled by 33 degree water from our hydrocoolers. This right here is what we’re looking for there’s the final product what we want is a consistent box with great eating quality so the customers come back time and again. Okay so I want to thank Clay for taking us through the warehouse. It amazes me the amount of technology that guys around the world have come up with to gently and precisely handle these cherries. But I’m really impressed with my cousins and my brother because they have learned to use that technology to bring the right product to you and that makes us all proud. So this is Farm Friday and I’ll see you next week!”
