Packhouses stick produce with labels that contain information such as barcodes, price look-up (PLU) numbers, brand and country of origin. With some packhouses labeling up to a billion fruits and vegetables a year, that’s a lot of labeling.

Founded in 1982, Sinclair Systems International focuses on automating the produce labeling process to improve efficiencies, says product manager Barry Lawson. The company’s systems label apples, citrus, kiwis, potatoes and avocadoes, as well as greenhouse-grown crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. “If you go into a market today, it’s probably safe to say that 75 percent of the fruit in there has been labeled with Sinclair equipment,” Lawson says.

For years, Sinclair has pre-printed labels, working with an in-house graphic artist to create labels that are specific shapes and sizes, and match clients’ branding goals, Lawson says. But as packhouses wanted to increase productivity and decrease labor costs, they looked to more fully automated labeling technology.

Retailers request that 90 to 95 percent of their produce is labeled so they don’t lose revenue. If a piece of fruit doesn’t have a label on it, Lawson says a cashier could ring it up for a lower price than what it is worth. If a fruit is worth 50 cents and the cashier rings it up for 25 cents, that’s 25 cents gone. “The supermarket lost that revenue, the grower lost that revenue and the packhouse is going to lose that revenue as well,” he says.

Various systems from Sinclair, including direct thermal technology, online labeling and pattern labeling, have been replacing costly and imperfect labor in packhouses, Lawson says.

Direct thermal labeling

When running labels through Sinclair’s direct thermal technology machines, packers install bitmaps (images consisting of small dots) into the machine’s computer system. “You have fixed print on the label that we’ve made, so you’re going to have the brand name at the top and maybe something at the bottom, but at the middle, you want a different origin, PLU or [variable],” Lawson says.

When it comes time to label another type of produce, the operator picks out a new bitmap, but doesn’t have to change the cassette of labels, Lawson says.

Online labeling

In Sinclair’s online labeling systems, produce runs through a sizer to be measured for size, texture and bruising. The sizer recognizes the produce and sends a signal to the machine.

An example of an online labeling system is Sinclair’s six-head RM6 system, Lawson says. “You have lanes running across that can label all the fruit simultaneously,” he says. “Then we have a V6, which is a smaller, single-lane system that gives you some flexibility for smaller pack houses. If you want to unhook it and move it somewhere else, you have that luxury.”

Pattern labeling

Pattern labeling is popular in Europe, where produce is stacked on trays on top of each other at retail, Lawson says. In pattern labeling, trays that hold a certain amount of produce feed through a machine. Because the produce stays firm in the tray after labeling, the label is always visible on each individual crop.

Up to 500 patterns can be programmed into Sinclair’s new Compact Pattern Labeller (CPL) system, which the company introduced in 2017, Lawson says. “You pick the pattern that you want to run, and then you do not have to crank the cassettes, or the heads, to go up and down, according to the size of fruit,” he says. “It’s already loaded according to the pattern that you have.”

With Sinclair’s multiple systems, the company aims for integration and smart technology, allowing packers to walk around with tablets and know their labeling percentage, and be aware of when they will run out of cassettes. “They want early warning systems, so to speak, so they want diagnostics,” Lawson says.

Mexican company Sistemas Agro App has developed and introduced SMATTCOM, an app that aims to allow produce professionals to more easily navigate the supply chain.

The app’s features include a price monitor; messaging within commercial networks; searches based on market, country and product characteristics; and notifications of matching traders. Products displayed in the app are sorted by variety, as well as quality, size and packaging, says Walter Arriaga, SMATTCOM technological advisor.

“Currently the usage of SMATTCOM is free and unlimited for everyone, so members can learn which set of features matches the best with their necessities and their working style,” Arriaga says. “Over time, we will gradually introduce ‘functional bundles’ with differentiated costs, including a free basic service for those who really don’t need that many features.”

Believing that the produce industry could best achieve its full potential through technological innovation, Sistemas Agro App’s CEO and founder, Sergio Alejandro Roldán Vázquez, developed SMATTCOM as the company’s first product. Sistemas Agro App began developing SMATTCOM in 2016. It came out with a functional version of the app around the end of July 2017, Arriaga says, but the product had its “Big Bang” at the Produce Marketing Association’s Fresh Summit event in New Orleans in October 2017.

Arriaga says SMATTCOM offers produce professionals three primary advantages: to expand their networks, gather information about market prices in real time and become aware of business opportunities. The app functions as a social network, so final transactions and agreements do not take place within it.

“Currently, our catalogs contain markets and products from U.S., Mexico and several Central and South American countries,” Arriaga says. “But to add a new country or region, all we need is a few interested users and a list of relevant markets and products to put things in motion.”

The user interface is navigable to both speakers of English and Spanish, and the company intends to add new languages in the future, Arriaga says. Prices are in the currency of the market where producers place their offers. When asked if SMATTCOM replaces the roles of brokers, Arriaga says, “SMATTCOM strengthens connections between producers, intermediaries, distributors and end customers. The effect is that all of them, without exception, potentialize their opportunities. No producer has an infrastructure large enough to get his/her product all the way to the end customers.”

“We must not forget that the free fluctuation of prices is the correct formula for this type of product,” Arriaga says. “If all the participants assume their role, we have an ideal scenario to establish the correct price. In this model all participants add up, regardless of their size. The difference is the level of information available for everyone to make their decisions.”

In the future, Sistemas Agro App plans to support producers, distributors and wholesale customers in a more structured way, Arriaga says. Individual tools and complete suites could help producers monitor planning and production, distributors move product in and out of diverse markets and wholesale customers manage a range of offers and suppliers.

Someday plants may be able to tell us if they need water and nutrients, or if they’re not feeling so well. Sound absurd? One company is experimenting with tiny strips that attach to plants that can relay this information. The technology is being tested with outdoor agriculture. For now, though, growers have access to tried and tested technology that will help reduce operating costs and produce a better crop.

I got my eye on you

Sometimes it’s hard, if not impossible, to be everywhere at once in a greenhouse, especially when your houses are measured in acres.

Luna, created by a Seattle-based company called iUNU, offers growers an extra set of eyes and more. This high-tech system features mobile and stationary cameras and monitors that can keep an eye on each plant in your house, no matter how big your operation.

“We can help with the challenges that large-scale operations can have trying to monitor everything in large facilities or even on multiple sites,” CEO Adam Greenberg says.

The camera sensors run along rails above the plants in a greenhouse. Looking down on a crop, they do more than a camera watching people move about in a city. You might call them smart sensors because they know what they’re looking for in a crop.

“Plants don’t always grow in a linear fashion,” Greenberg says. “We had to know how that plant grows, what it is supposed to do.” He says that’s why it was important to tap into the expertise of horticulture professionals as well as techies.

In addition to spotting insect and disease problems in a greenhouse, the technology can track inventory, making the most of available space on the benches, determining when to harvest, and planning and recordkeeping, according to Greenberg. It can also alert growers when it spots discoloration due to chlorosis, especially in places where a grower might not be able to see it, such as the center of the benches. While it may reduce the need for labor, it also has the potential to identify the best workers.

“We know this is a highly competitive industry for workers. There is weekly turnover of employees,” Greenberg says. “With this technology we can manage the workforce more efficiently and also know who our good workers are and what they’re best at.”

iUNU partners with growers to get the system up and running, assuring that everything is in place before they turn over the keys, or in this case, the password.

“We’re investing in their infrastructure,” Greenberg says. “They’re only paying us when we turn the system on, thus avoiding any capital expenditures.”

Measuring all types of light

If a straw poll of produce growers was taken, it would most likely show that lighting is one of the top concerns with growers, whether that lighting comes from the sun beating through the poly or artificial lighting in a converted warehouse.

“To date, the prevalent approach for supplemental lighting appears to be ‘What is the growing area?’, ‘What is the desired light level in µmol m^-2 s^-1?,’ ‘And how many light fixtures are needed to meet this requirement?’” says Ian Ashdown, senior scientist at British Columbia-based SunTracker Technologies.

Ashdown says that coming from the architectural world of electric lighting and daylighting design, there are many more factors horticultural professionals can use to determine the quality and quantity of light that will reach the leaf canopy of the crops (and when during the day and year).

The technology becoming available can help growers make decisions regarding lighting in real time. Light varies greatly in a greenhouse, and this technology can measure and interpret it all and make the information useful for greenhouse operators.

The Cerise 365 from SunTracker is a software technology that uses both climatic data and technical data to come up with “light recipes” that manufacturers and designers can pass along to growers.

More specifically, Cerise 365 technology uses typical meteorological year (TMY) weather data for 2,000 locations worldwide to calculate site-specific daylight availability based on many variables, including building orientation. This data is valuable during the greenhouse design phase when decisions are made about where to locate a greenhouse.

According to the manufacturer, the technology can calculate “in seconds” daylight availability at any location in the greenhouse on an hourly basis throughout the year. This information can greatly assist greenhouse designers and manufacturers as they help growers make important decisions and invest their capital.

This technology comes from research and an understanding of architectural lighting and issues that affect lighting in the varied situations in the horticultural space, including the variations in light coming in through different types of coverings.  

“We are currently working with several manufacturers to provide them with a better understanding of the issues, but there are many more,” Ashdown says.

Keeping an eye on tomatoes

All eyes are on tomatoes at Texas-based NatureSweet. The tomato-producing company is using artificial intelligence in some of their houses to monitor its tomatoes 24/7, rather than once a week as they did before investing in AI. The result has been a reduction in labor costs and an increase in harvests by two to four percent.

The technology, developed by the Israeli digital farming company Prospera, consists of 10 cameras installed in the ceilings of the houses that are continuously snapping pictures of the crop below. The software has been programmed to spot trouble, such as an insect infestation or wilting plants before it can get out of hand.

Back at the office, workers can access computer screens for those houses that currently have the technology installed, and more importantly, where there might be trouble brewing. Little red dots on individual plants indicate a pest infestation.

Perhaps the real value of AI in this case is the ability to compile data that can be used to make future growing decisions. That data is available to anyone in the company who has the accompanying app.

NatureSweet’s chief innovation officer Adrian Almeida is confident the new technology will eventually improve tomato yields by 20 percent. The technology, which he admits is still a work in progress, should help save in inputs of water and insect and disease controls as better monitoring of crops is achieved.

“It’ll be better for the environment and for the customer,” Almeida told CNN in an interview.

Daniel Koppel, the founder of Prospera, was originally interested in predicting crop yields from satellite images — information that could be used to trade commodities on Wall Street. Instead, he turned to doing something for the greater good that would have more of a global impact: growing quality produce. The company has plans to use its technology to track additional crops inside and outside of greenhouses, including peppers and potatoes. As for NatureSweet, it has plans to spy on more of its tomatoes, having raised $15 million dollars for expansion into all of its greenhouses.

Neil is a copywriter for the green industry and frequent contributor to Produce Grower. greenindustrywriter.com

Aiming to resolve labor shortages and improve space efficiency at greenhouse operations producing leafy greens, Green Automation develops, manufactures and sells automated growing systems with movable gutters for nutrient film technique (NFT) hydroponic lettuce production. The company is based in Finland and established a U.S.-based subsidiary, Green Automation Americas, in 2015. Its North American clients include Little Leaf Farms in Devens, Massachusetts; lef Farms in Loudon, New Hampshire; and Gotham Greens in New York City and Chicago.

“Our system is more like a manufacturing production system in some ways,” says Green Automation Americas CEO Patrik Borenius. “It [can have] hundreds of conveyor belts and thousands of sensors. Everything’s automated. You almost need a different skillset. You need factory people more so than [greenhouse] labor, and you have very few people,” he says.

Green Automation’s technology includes gutters that automatically adjust to separate crops as they grow, Borenius says. The systems give plants enough space to grow, while at the same time trying to ensure as much space efficiency as possible in the greenhouse.

The systems

The company has tiers of automation from system to system, Borenius says. Green Automation’s Automated System, which is optimized for head lettuce production, requires humans to perform certain tasks, such as transplanting seedlings into the growing system and harvesting. “In the beginning, everything’s very close together,” Borenius says. “That’s really where the efficiency comes from, having everything really close together when [the plants] don’t need the space. Only as they grow, that’s when — up to five stages, over the length of the greenhouse — those gutters separate out from each other, until the final spacing, which could be seven, eight inches apart for those gutters, for the heads to give them the space they need.”

By comparison, Green Automation’s Fully Automated System is optimized for baby leaf lettuce production and doesn’t involve any human contact with the produce, Borenius says. “The seeding is [done directly] into the gutter, then germination takes place in the system,” he says. “Then at the end of the growing cycle, those gutters are moved on turntables and conveyors to an automatic cutting machine [to harvest the lettuce]. The substrate is removed automatically, the gutters are cleaned, and then it starts again — the process with the automatic filling step, either rockwool or peat — and then seeding again.”

Out of Green Automation America’s clients, lef Farms and Little Leaf Farms produce baby leaf lettuce using the Fully Automated System, while Gotham Greens uses the Automated Growing System to produce head lettuce and herbs. Because Gotham Greens grows its product in rooftop greenhouses and has some dimension restrictions within its houses, the company has incorporated more manual steps into its process.

In addition to offering technology, Green Automation Americas has an advantage over European technology companies that work in the produce space, Borenius says. “We’re selling the systems in U.S. dollars from a U.S. entity to a client,” he says. “You don’t have to deal with exchange rates — Euros.”

Founded in Finland

Green Automation’s founders, Tero Rapila and Juhana Kantola, are from Finland. For more than 40 years, Rapila’s family has run a lettuce greenhouse operation. “Initially, they developed a system for their own use, and they did this back in the ’80s,” he says. “They started out and improved it further and further, and the system got better and better. Then in 2002, they decided to go out into the market and sell this to other growers around the world.”

Rapila and Kantola created the technology because manual greenhouse production involves many labor-intensive steps, but there was a scarcity of labor in Finland and a high cost associated with it. Finland imported fresh lettuce from Spain, Greece and Portugal, and the product lost its freshness and nutritional value during long deliveries.

“It’s like a six-day truck trip — very expensive,” says Borenius, who was born to Finnish parents in Germany and now lives in the United States. “[The founders] very early realized that we really need to do this ourselves. It’s very difficult to get it from all the way down in Spain, so they started with this.”

Because of its climate, Finland has a short growing season, so Rapila and Kantola realized greenhouse production would be the best way to provide consumers with fresh and locally grown produce, Borenius says. Decades later, the technology that addressed labor problems in Northern Europe in the 1980s began to help growers facing similar issues in North America.

Competing with megatrends

Borenius sees many agricultural “megatrends” impacting agricultural open-field operations in the Western United States. Many of these operations use an abundance of water, which is in scarce supply, and unsustainable amounts of nitrate from many of their fertilizer programs enter aquifers. Meanwhile, field growers are encountering more trouble finding labor; while extreme, unpredictable weather hurts their yields. Borenius has noticed demand increasing for pesticide-free hydroponic greenhouse production, and he thinks it can be cost-competitive with open-field growers if greenhouse producers address space and labor efficiency, as well as energy efficiency.

Green Automation recommends growers produce in greenhouses and use light from the sun for energy efficiency, but the company could arrange its growing system in layers for vertical farm or plant factory applications, Borenius says. “There will always be the need to be as space-efficient as possible, to minimize the investment, optimize it, and there will always be a need to be as labor-efficient as possible, because whatever happens in the future, labor will be an issue,” he says.

“You’ve got to get the highest yields per square foot in your greenhouse, and then you’ve got to do it with as little labor as possible,” Borenius says. “We think our system is absolutely a key component of achieving this, at least for leafy greens. There are other systems for other crops that make sense, but for leafy greens, we think we’re really on the forefront of this.”