TOMRA Food to showcase breadth of food sorting capabilities at Pack Expo 2019

At Pack Expo 2019 in Las Vegas, the TOMRA 5B will be sorting French fries and green beans live. This machine guarantees optimal sorting of a variety of food products, from vegetables and potatoes to leafy products, helping customers meet the highest standards for both food safety and quality.

The TOMRA 5B incorporates TOMRA’s smart surround view technology, which features high-resolution cameras and high-intensity LEDs, providing 360-degree inspection and SmartSort.

Mark Host, Regional Sales Director Americas at TOMRA Food:

“These innovations result in improved product quality, and also improve foreign material removal, while ensuring a reduction of false rejection rates.”

With worldwide demand for potato products continuing to grow, TOMRA Food is supporting potato processors by offering an enhanced sorting solution which removes more than 98 percent of all typical foreign objects found in product streams after washing and peeling.

Food processors struggling with filtering out such foreign materials and defects such as stones, plastics, glass, wood, metal, corncobs and rot before peeling, will welcome another sorting machine, the TOMRA 5A.


Mark Host, who noted that the TOMRA 5A sorter builds on the company’s decades-long partnership with the potato industry as well as its dominance in potato sorting technology with its new quality management controls and new peel control module:

“TOMRA is already responsible for peeling an estimated 85 percent of the world’s potatoes for French fries,”

“In addition to improving yields and lowering operational costs, the TOMRA 5A enhances food safety with its sophisticated ability to remove foreign material and minimize the risk of food contamination,”

“The new sorters offer enhanced sanitation features that have been designed and developed in accordance with the latest food hygiene standards and specifications,”

“The TOMRA 5B, in particular, has a fast and efficient cleaning process that results in fewer unreachable areas and reduced waste material.”

“Both sorters are extremely user-friendly and easy for operators to manage.”

This new technology ensures the food safety of the whole potato along the entire processing line. In addition, it also dramatically reduces the risk of foreign objects damaging cutting equipment or otherwise contributing to a line stoppage.

One of the most important new features of both machines is their ability to help customers meet the latest regulatory food safety and quality standards.

Host also noted that customers are embracing the company’s powerful and award-winning TOMRA ACT. This intuitive graphical user interface design encompasses a one-screen layout, enabling users to see all critical sort information and real-time sorting data at a glance.

Quick monitoring and fast adjustments are possible at all times, which means the customer is always in control of the quality of the sorting.

TOMRA Food will also be promoting its state-of-the-art sorting solutions for a variety of confectionery applications. Their Genius optical belt sorter uses advanced high-resolution camera and laser technologies in different inspection zones to reliably detect cross-contamination, starch and foreign materials, as well as identifying clumping and misshapen products.

This model has become a favorite in the North American market, where high demand for vitamin enhanced confectionery presents the challenge of separating almost identically colored sweets with totally different vitamin-enhanced characteristics.

TOMRA Food will also offer the Nimbus free-fall sorter, which stands out for its capability to sort a variety of products – such as sugar-free, with-sugar and multivitamin sweets – with a variety of programs and applications, all on the same platform.

This solution is in demand in European markets, where factories produce a variety of confectioneries and need to guarantee their customers a product free of cross-contamination.

Mark Host:

“While the confectionery industry hadn’t invested in sensor-based sorting technology until very recently, most manufacturers are now turning to these solutions to achieve the consistent quality levels and reliable separation required by their customers.

This is a fast-growing market that presents a huge opportunity for TOMRA. Our sorters are meeting with great success in the markets for their capacity to provide a complete solution and for our ability to address the great diversity of sweet recipes at different manufacturers, tailoring our systems to each customer’s requirements.

This year we have installed our sensor-based sorting systems in Europe and the United States, where they are achieving excellent results for our customers.”

TOMRA Food has recently also become the first to provide advanced sorting solutions for petfood producers. By developing four new sorting applications of its proven technologies, TOMRA has made it possible for petfood manufacturers to easily remove even very small particles of foreign materials from dry meat and bone meal, ground frozen meat, biscuits residue, and dry kibble.

All four new sorting applications have been validated over the last two years at TOMRA facilities, as well as in real-world working conditions at petfood manufacturing plants in Europe and the United States.

By recalibrating sorting machines originally designed to ensure the purity of food for human consumption, extensive tests have identified the best TOMRA equipment for specific petfood sorting tasks and have arrived at the optimal configurations for sorting efficiency and product yield.

TOMRA personnel will be on hand to explain more about all their newest sorting solutions at Pack Expo 2019, Las Vegas Convention Center, 23 – 25 September, Booth US-7258.