At Frestia, the emphasis is on taste, innovation and customer-oriented thinking. The nursery in Honselersdijk is constantly looking for new insights and developments to improve the quality of its product and optimise the cultivation process. Gearbox found a launching partner for the GearPerformer in Frestia. Patrick Franken of Frestia sees the Performer as the beginning of a new start in innovation and robotisation at the company.
Patrick Franken expects the GearPerformer to enable the company to anticipate (future) issues such as labour savings, quality improvement and customer-specific requirements even better. We want to look ahead, he says. The GearPerformer is used in the quality assessment of snack peppers. "More than 300 peppers per minute pass over the conveyor belt and have to be selected for quality. Until recently, snack peppers were inspected by two people. With this volume, it is not always possible to remove 100 per cent of all products that do not meet the quality standards. In addition, the availability of personnel is becoming an increasingly greater challenge."
Frestia was one of the first greenhouse horticulture companies to market snack peppers in the Netherlands. We want to be trendsetters, says Franken. "We are pioneering new varieties and new characteristics to improve quality. Taste is of paramount importance, and quality is part of that. You taste with your eyes, so external characteristics are relevant. Consumers put snack peppers straight into their mouths. The product must meet all the desired quality requirements."
“I see the GearPerformer as the beginning of a new start in innovation and robotisation at the company.”
-Patrick Franken of Frestia
All the pieces of the puzzle in place
The question arose: what can robotisation mean for the optimisation of business processes and how can I use it with the product, according to the grower. "We entered into discussions with various parties, including parties from the industry. Then you encounter limitations, for example because certain innovations are not yet applicable in our company." In the discussions with Gearbox, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. "Initially, we wanted to take the next step in the processing of pointed peppers, but because the snack pepper process is already automated after the quality inspection, the GearPerformer in this configuration proved to be a more logical start."
Frestia and Gearbox sat down together to discuss what the new machine should look like and what requirements it should meet. The process from concept idea to delivery took about a year and a half. "We started with a Proof of Concept, in which Gearbox demonstrated that the machine could be built, so that we could come up with a design together. We have practical experience in-house; we know what the quality issues are. And I am a grower, so I am not hindered by any technical limitations. That helps us to work with the technical people at Gearbox to come up with a direction that is workable."
By combining camera technology, smart AI software and robotics, the device is able to assess the quality of the product from all sides and remove any peppers that do not meet the requirements, according to Franken. "A reporting tool gives us real-time insight into the quality of a batch. We are now working on fine-tuning the machine even further to meet quality requirements: it is becoming smarter and better every day."
Source of new insights
A valuable bonus is that the GearPerformer generates a huge amount of data, which Frestia can use to optimise its greenhouse processes, according to Franken. "The device provides us with a source of new insights into things that we didn't have such a clear picture of before. We now know exactly what the characteristics of a batch are and what percentage has which length. We can also monitor the characteristics of the variety better. We normally assess those characteristics with our eyes. We now have a whole dataset at our disposal, so we can look at that variety in a different way."
In addition, Frestia can focus even more on the customer level, not only in terms of quality, but also in terms of customer preferences. "Suppose we sort the snack peppers according to a certain size. Peppers that are too small or too large are then automatically removed. This allows us to introduce a new segment to the market. We want to differentiate ourselves more towards our customers. I expect that this will have a significant impact."
Send even more data in the greenhouse
Franken hopes that Frestia will be able to use the GearPerformer to manage greenhouse data even more effectively in the future. For example, by using this data to trace why a quality issue has arisen and what can be done about it in the cultivation process, he explains. He also sees good opportunities to use the Gearbox software to generate data that can link climate conditions in the greenhouse to variety selection or product quality, such as the influence of temperature or amount of sunlight in the greenhouse on the length of the pepper. "The more data we uncover, the more we can optimise the cultivation processes. I see the GearPerformer as the beginning of a new start in innovation and robotisation at our company."
