UNITEC’s technologies about chestnut campaign
The more and more unforeseeable weather like the one that characterized the 2023 chestnut campaign, with a too rainy spring and a too dry fall, has affected the harvest.
Furthermore, as a more serious matter, it has caused variability in the quality of available production which, without the help of UNITEC’s technologies, risked jeopardizing the commercial value of the product to the point of even preventing its sale.
“Indeed, the harvest has been delayed not only by dry heat, but also by the summer drought that had already increased the presence of cracked product together with product with holes, which is due to insect attacks”, points out Aroldo Mastrogregori, in charge of the homonymous chestnut company which, in the center of Monti Cimini, grows, harvests and markets 6,500 tons of fresh chestnuts per year.
These are defects that until now were manually sorted by 25 people in charge of this work, with increasing difficulties and less and less precision, while the incidence of defects raised. “From this year – continues Mastrogregori – with the installation of CHESTNUT VISION – the solution entirely developed by UNITEC for the external quality selection of chestnuts – we have considerably improved, since despite the high percentage of defects we managed to obtain a continuous quality on huge quantities of product, handled in a very short time.
This allowed us to offer our clients a product in line with the market demands from the point of view of quality and, above all, to drastically reduce costs, especially labor costs for product sorting”. “All the handling process has been sped up, also because we have always used our packing lines only partially, due to the slowness of manual sorting and the consequent shortage of feeding with the sorted product; however, nowadays we do not have this problem anymore. This is because we have great quantities of product ready to be packed and delivered, since 99% of sorting is automated using UNITEC’s line”.
“Of course, we were a bit scared at the beginning – states Mastrogregori – because with UNITEC’s line equipped with CHESTNUT VISION everything changed inside our company and, above all, we were scared of the approach to the line management.
Nonetheless, also thanks to UNITEC’s qualified staff, who assisted us and still assists us teaching us how to use the line, this fear has disappeared now. Indeed, it is a very flexible line: according to the kind of product we sort, we use a specific program, among programs which can be created without limits. According to what we want to sort and how we want to sort it, a customized program is created, and we can use it again over time”. “By working on the vision system parameters – adds Mastrogregori – we truly manage to identify many kinds of defects and, for many of them, we can also recover the waste product to allocate it to a market different from the fresh market”.
