UK potato and vegetable handling equipment manufacturer Tong Engineering is celebrating 50 years of vegetable grading screen manufacture this month.

“We are very proud of our heritage in supplying high quality vegetable handling equipment to growers and packers in the UK and worldwide,” says Edward Tong, managing director at Tong Engineering. “Manufacturing steel grading screens for 50 years means we have developed an inherent capability to produce a huge variety of grading screen sizes, within very short lead times, which has proved invaluable to our expanding customer base.”

Ian Evison, aftersales manager at Tong Engineering, oversees the grading screen production department today, and highlights the company’s evolution: “We’ve seen many developments in 50 years of production,” says Evison. “The screen manufacturing was traditionally very manual and in 2014, after much research into automating the process, Tong invested in a CNC folder to increase output while maintaining the accuracy of the manual process. This transformed our production capabilities further and meant we can now offer the fastest turnaround of screen production on the market.”

Tong now manufactures grading screens up to 2.4m wide in a vast range of grading size options ranging from 20mm to 148mm in any width or length to suit grower’s exact requirements. As well as square screens, Tong manufactures steel hexagon grading screens for much better grading accuracy of rounded crop varieties including onions, some variety of potatoes, swedes, turnips and celeriac.

“We now operate a very strong stock-manufacturing program, allowing us to offer an even wider variety of sizes in stock, for immediate delivery,” says Evison. “We not only manufacture screens for Tong equipment worldwide, but also to suit other manufacturer’s equipment too, and that’s not to mention our complete in-house repair service. We are dedicated to offer our customers throughout the world the complete solution to their vegetable grading needs.”