We installed the optical sorter in early August, right before the Fuji harvest. The first week we ran it twelve hours a day and the reject rate stayed under two percent. Our manual team of fourteen now handles quality checks on the packing side instead of standing at the sorting table.

The stainless steel conveyor sections arrived with all the mounting brackets pre-drilled, so our maintenance crew had the full line assembled in three days. We run Gala and Honeycrisp on the same belt, and the speed adjustment handles both without changing the sorting accuracy.

What sold me was the service schedule. Pepipommes sends a technician every quarter to check the laser calibration and belt tension. We had one sensor drift in November and the replacement unit arrived within two days, so we never stopped the line.

Our old sorting table needed six people per shift. Now we run the same volume with two operators monitoring the screens. The payback was faster than we estimated because the sorter also catches bruising that the manual team used to miss on darker apple varieties.