Last week, BEST opened its fourth Sorting Solution Centre (BSSC) in a new building at its headquarters in Leuven, Belgium.

Creating an optimised customer experience, the Solution Centre is the place where prospective and current customers can test the BEST sorting solutions in an environment that simulates their production process.

BEST uses customers' products to demonstrate the efficiency of its sorters, allowing the client to evaluate the results before investing.

This BEST Sorting Solution Centre is the fourth one in its kind. BEST now has two innovation centres in Leuven (Belgium), one in Denver (USA) and one in Hanghzou (China).

All these facilities are located close to international airports, and are easily accessible, offering an optimal customer comfort.

BEST has more than 20 machines available in the different locations. Many configurations of the different models are available for testing and demonstrations, allowing a multitude of applications to be tested.

On Wednesday September 21, Kris Peeters, Flemish Prime Minister, opened the new solution centre in Leuven.

On this occasion, and combined with the 15th anniversary of BEST, the company also announced two new technological innovations, with the next generation free fall sorters, the Opus and the Nimbus sorter.

The Nimbus is a laser/camera sorting solution that combines the efficiency of the laser detection on foreign material, together with the accuracy of the camera detecting discolorations and shape differences in free-fall.

The sorter detects all color, structure, size and shape defects from a stream of good products. Besides these conventional sorting methods, the Nimbus is also able to sort based on biological characteristics, such as chlorophyll (Fluo), mycotoxins (Detox), and water (SWIR).

To sort on shape characteristics, the machine is equipped with an additional module with a general shape sorting toolbox that adds complementary sorting capabilities by applying object oriented features like length, width, diameter, area, broken piece recognition, etc. ...