Tomra Food Inaugurates New Demo Center and Hub in Valencia
Tomra Food has opened a new facility focused on fresh vegetables, fruits, and processed food items. The site in Valencia is easily accessible and amid a significant horticulture and nut growing zone.
The center’s closeness to its clients and partners will allow the firm to demonstrate the performance and advantages of its optical sorters through on-site demonstrations. The facility will also function as Tomra Food’s major hub for Southern Europe and North Africa, as well as a training, service, and spare parts center, therefore expanding the company’s footprint in the EMEA market. This move is part of the company’s regional reorganization in EMEA.
“We want to work directly with the customer in as few time zones as possible. This enables us to be more agile, to establish an even closer relationship with our customers, and ultimately to work better locally. It is vital to improving the speed and quality of communications to always offer the best service,” Karel Strubbe, the new SVP and Head of Tomra Food for Europe, Africa and the Middle East (EMEA) explained.
Tomra Food views its connection with its clients as a collaborative process in which both parties strive for the best solution for each project and collaborate on the development of new solutions. The Spanish fruit, vegetable, and nut industry, which is critical to the corporation, is heavily concentrated in the eastern Levante and nearby areas. That is why the new center in Valencia, which is now fully operating, is a critical step toward enhancing this personal approach and cultivating tight relationships and communication with growers.
Tomra Food’s expert team will manage the company’s European projects from their base in the Valencia center. The site will be the hub for demonstrations of large and small fruit applications. It will also conduct occasional demonstrations for processed food, although Belgium will continue to be the center of reference for these products. It will also deliver training for company staff and Tomra Food customer operators.
The center also serves as an after-sales service hub in the EMEA region and stores spare parts to reduce delivery times. A local technical team of 15 people, headed by Team Leader Jorge García Cascales, provides excellent support to the almost 400 machines in fresh and processed food installations in Spain and Portugal and also serves other countries in the region.
“For us, demonstration centers are very important. They enable us to show our customers what our sorting machines can achieve for them. The majority of demonstrations at the Valencia Center are for citrus, blueberries, and whole potatoes. Customers can also bring their products and receive support tailored to their needs. The whole TOMRA team is very excited about the new center,” Alejandro Palacios, Tomra Food’s regional sales manager for Southern Europe, mentioned.
Jesus Hernandez, sales manager of TOMRA Food Spain, added that TOMRA is a European company.
“In the short term, we have set ourselves the goal of becoming the sales leader in the EMEA Region – a position we already hold in other regions such as the United States, South Africa, and Australia. Tomra’s new center in Valencia is the company’s response to the specific needs of the market. We are growing at a good pace, and we have expansion plans. To achieve this goal, we are focusing our efforts on continuous innovation, delivering excellent service and customer-centered advice and expertise. Ultimately, we want to be close to our customers and convey that we continue to offer value-added solutions and services,” Hernandez declared.
Tomra solutions at the European center in Valencia: among others, a Tomra 3A optical sorter for unwashed potatoes featuring the latest mechanical and vision advances is available for demonstrations.
“The idea is to have machines […] always at the center. […] We will also have a circulation of fresh food machines according to seasonal fruit and processed food sorters to support the various campaigns,” explains Alejandro Palacios.
Jesus Hernandez mentioned also that the company’s technology has to be seen first-hand, and tested with each customer’s fruit.
“Tomra’s strong commitment to R&D allows us to offer customized solutions and services. Integrated sorting and grading solutions reduce labor requirements while increasing yield, and product consistency and traceability. They also ensure efficiency in all post-harvest stages, so that our customers get the best return on their investment, and faster,” Hernandez declared.
Tomra’s technologies are in constant evolution, with innovations such as the 5.0 more intuitive and predictive software, or the Inspectra2 spectrometry system that reveals the internal condition of the fruit, coming on stream.
Tomra Food is not short of innovations. It will soon unveil to the European markets the recently launched Spectrim X platform, which reduces sorting errors and increases the yield of each batch of fruit. The Spectrim X series with Deep Learning technology, which has been tested for 18 months in plants in the U.S. and New Zealand, represents a breakthrough in performance compared to its predecessor. It reduces inspection errors, consequently increasing throughput.
“This is, without doubt, the big novelty, and will be very interesting for the market,” concludes Jesus Hernandez.
TomraFood is a world leader in optical sorting, grading, and peeling solutions. Its main markets are the U.S., Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Italy, South Africa, Australia and China. As a global company, it required a more focused approach which the company’s new EVP and Head of Tomra Food, Harald Henriksen, addressed with the creation of a regional structure for the organization.