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Vegetable Ingredients Supplier Goes Digital

GC Farms turns to data platform to improve line rates, product quality, yields, and profitability.

GC Farms turned to the recently-launched Tomra Insight data platform from Tomra Food, a designer and manufacturer of sensor-based sorting machines and integrated post-harvest systems.
GC Farms turned to the recently-launched Tomra Insight data platform from Tomra Food, a designer and manufacturer of sensor-based sorting machines and integrated post-harvest systems.

American agriculture and food business, George Chiala Farms (GC Farms) produces prepared vegetable ingredients for well-known consumer brands whose products—such as soups, salsas, and frozen entrees—are sold throughout the USA. The business operates two processing plants year round, both in Central California, employing approximately 500 people and processing more than 120 million pounds of vegetable ingredients annually. This throughput requires about 150 million pounds of raw vegetables, some grown by GC Farms and some by third-party suppliers.

“As the industry moves toward ready-to-eat products, our customers’ quality expectations have gotten a lot higher,” states GC Farms’ director of operations, Charles Cutler. “Quality used to mean assuring food safety. Now it’s about achieving product perfection. That’s why we have made a big shift in the last couple of years from manual sorting to automated sorting. This has taken our product quality to a higher standard, allowed us to reduce and stabilize our labor force, and reduced our labor costs for sorting on our Hollister location line by 75%.”

But shifting to automated sorting has not been enough. “The quality of our raw materials can vary a lot, but the quality of what goes out to our customers has to be consistently high,” Cutler explains. “To give our customers everything they ask for in quality, it is George Chiala Jr.’s vision to embrace digitalization, to be at the forefront of our industry.”

To make this vision a reality, GC Farms turned to the recently-launched Tomra Insight data platform from Tomra Food, a designer and manufacturer of sensor-based sorting machines and integrated post-harvest systems. The two companies have worked together in the past, with an assortment of Tomra belt sorters and free-fall sorters installed at both of GC Farms’ locations to help the company cope with increasing production volumes.  

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