Saving Time and Reducing Waste, the Impact of Felix Instruments’ Avocado Meter on the Food Industry

To enhance the efficiency of quality assurance procedures, Normec Maas Goodacre has recently acquired a second Avocado Meter from Felix Instruments. In this exclusive interview, Matthijs Jongejan, a dedicated quality inspector and supervisor at Normec Maas Goodacre, sheds light on the features of the instrument, its practical applications, and the compelling reasons behind its necessity in its operations.

Dutch-based Normec Maas Goodacre is a leader in providing comprehensive solutions for food safety and quality within the food industry, renowned for its integrated approach that encompasses everything from process control, laboratory analysis, and taste evaluations to QA automation and risk management.

Felix Instruments is at the forefront of creating the world's most precise, portable, and non-destructive measurement tools. These instruments are designed to serve multiple purposes:

• In crop management and harvest: they provide precise measurements of avocado quality within seconds, enabling data-driven decision-making for harvest planning.
• In Post-harvest quality assurance: they facilitate the inspection of incoming avocados and assess various quality parameters in cold storage, ripening rooms, distribution centers, etc.
• In crop breeding and research: these instruments expedite the collection of internal quality data, supporting high-throughput phenotyping, breeding programs, and analytical research endeavors.

Matthijs Jongejan highlights the efficiency brought by Felix Instruments' Avocado meter:

"Instrument saves us a lot of time, which is crucial for us at the moment. We are receiving a lot of avocados now, a lot of new shipments. For every shipment that arrives, we take samples from each container. Different grower, different sizing. And then we measure the dry matter of the avocados. For example, if 20 containers arrive, additionally we have also air shipments, we need to sample 60 to 80 avocados per day”.

Jongejan continues:

“With the old oven method it takes at least 20 minutes per sample of manual work, so for 80 fruits we would have spent at least 3.5 working days, while with the quality meter by Felix Instruments, it takes around 1 minute - 1 and a half minutes for one avocado. The instrument takes 3 scans of one side of the fruit and then we flip it around and make another 3 scans. It is fantastic".

80 avocados per day should not be destroyed, as the Avocado quality meter is non-destructive, it uses near-infrared (NIR) technology and enables users to inspect incoming fruits and assess avocado quality parameters accurately. Businesses utilizing these advanced tools can benefit not only from significant time savings but also stop wasting a lot of fruits. Calculating the return on investment is straightforward: consider the number of fruits that can be sold per day alongside the saved staff working hours.

Schedule an appointment at Fruit Attraction, Madrid, Hall 6 Stand E16A.