Month: October 2025

Back in the spring, we had a call from down in Australia. A well-known Australian mango packer — Deane Farms of Horseshoe Lagoon, Queensland — was looking for an optical sorting solution that would offer them speed and accuracy in optical grading without requiring weeks of staff training, lots of maintenance and at a reasonable price.

We proposed the Sidewinder.

After the machine was completed, we broke it all down and shipped it to Queensland. For the past few weeks, two of our top-notch field technicians (William and Gunnar) have assembled the machine, got it up and running and just finished some calibration sorts. You can see in these photos that the machine looks at home in its new locale and the Sidewinder is humming.

If you’re sorting mangoes…or avocados, bell peppers, cucumbers, small melons, onions or either hard or soft squashes…and need an upgrade to your lines that will save you time, reduce labor costs, improve productivity and give you an ROI in no time, take a look at the (now!) world-famous Sidewinder. With its unique rolling presentation and tight links with our industry-leading ID Technology, you’ll see more and sort smarter…which is enough to make anyone’s day a g’day indeed.

We are making final preparations for the Produce Marketing Association’s annual Global Produce & Floral show, coming up next week (17-18 October) in Anaheim, California. We have built a hybrid optical sorter to demonstrate two of our different sorter types to the folks at this year’s show. This machine sports two lanes. One runs our Sidewinder sorter’s presentation system, featuring a spinning action that rotates product as it passes beneath the camera box — perfect for a number of produce types, including hard and soft squashes, mangoes, avocados, etc. The second lane runs our AccuVision RC’s roll carrier presentation system, which is designed for round produce like onions, small or round potato varieties, as well as bell peppers and the like.

We built this machine to allow folks to see how these two types of optical sorters operate and how well they integrate with our industry-leading ID Technology AI-powered grading suite. The tight integration of the presentation system with our high-definition cameras and specially-tuned LED lighting yields fantastically clear imagery. The ID Technology grading software uses that imagery to make near instant decisions on which drop to send each piece of product in the sort. It’s easy-to-learn and easy-to-use user interface gives operators instant feedback, live images and real-time statistical analysis to show operators what the results of a change in sorting parameters will mean for the rest of the sort. It’s so easy to use, you’ll be running each sort like an expert after an hour or two.

If you’re heading to the PMA’s show, please stop by booth 3011 at the Anaheim Convention Center. We’ll be happy to show you this machine in action and demonstrate just how ID Technology can help you see more and sort smarter.

Hope to see you there!