Optical tech sorts out the frozen veggies at Twin City Foods

Established in the 1940s, Twin City Foods is a US family-owned frozen vegetable business, processing around 45 million kg of product annually. Its frozen peas, corn, carrots and green beans are sold around the world for foodservice users and private-label retail packs. This year, Twin City Foods partnered with Key Technology and installed two VERYX optical sorters at the end of its lines that process both frozen peas and corn. The sorters are designed to remove all types of foreign material and processor-specified product defects to help ensure high product quality while maximising yield.

Twin City Foods prides itself on having the flexibility to accommodate any grade of frozen vegetables for its users. Dan Munko, Vice President of Operations at Twin City Foods, said, “Reliably achieving more unique grades requires sophisticated sorting, so we decided it was time to update our flagship facility in Pasco, Washington with the latest technology. We wanted optical sorters that would maximise our food safety and ensure exact product quality specifications, while also increasing yield, achieving high throughputs and simplifying our operations.”

Twin City Foods selected two of Key’s VERYX B210 belt-fed sorters, the highest capacity model in the VERYX family, which are each capable of processing up to 18,143 kg of frozen vegetables per hour. Both sorters are equipped with top-mounted off-axis cameras and laser sensors as well as Key’s Pixel Fusion detection module to achieve the company’s rigorous food safety and product quality objectives.

Recognising the colour, size, shape and structural property of every object, the sorters find and remove all types of foreign materials, including metal, plastic, insects, extraneous vegetative matter (EVM) and more as well as a variety of defects such as off-colour products and pulled corn kernels.

“EVM is an especially big concern when processing peas and corn since stems, pods and husks can come in from the field during harvesting. We have many steps to ensure EVM is removed during processing, and our VERYX sorters are a fantastic final quality check before packaging,” said Raul Martinez, Division Manager at Twin City Foods’ Pasco facility.

“We have recipes saved in each sorter’s memory to accommodate different varieties of corn and peas, different product grades and different growing conditions, which can affect taste, texture, the EVM and more,” Martinez said. “We’re easily able to tailor our VERYX programming to remove exactly what we need to, even when there are significant changes in incoming product.”

To further maximise equipment uptime and sorting performance, Twin City Foods’ systems are equipped with RemoteMD, which enables a two-way remote session between the sorter and a Key service technician to simplify diagnostics and speed the resolution of any issues.

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