EastPack’s Quarry Rd grader costs and lead time double

The newly installed grader at EastPack Quarry Road in Te Puke. Photo / Stuart Whitaker

The 2023 kiwifruit season marked the first use of a new $28 million grader at EastPack’s Quarry Rd packhouse.

The new grader is part of the ongoing investment in post harvest technology as EastPack prepares for anticipated increases in kiwifruit volumes.

“Despite a couple of slightly lower yield years, the reality is the orchards are still being planted, the vines are coming on and the fruit is still coming,” says EastPack CEO Hamish Simson.

“So, for us, we’re working on a multi-year plan to have the capacity for when the fruit comes.”

He says the new grader represents another step forward both for that plan, and in the automation process.

After a couple of pandemic-affected seasons, the new grader was to be up and running for an expected bumper season in 2023.

“But the reality is, with the warm winter, poor flowering and frosts, we’re about 20 per cent below what our target for this year was going to be, which was a bit over 50 million trays,” says Hamish.

“So we are packing about 40 million [this season], but next year looks like about 54 million trays, if things get back to normal. And by normal, I mean average yields.

“At that time the [new] big grader development is going to be very, very busy.”

There is a silver lining in the lower volumes of 2023.

“It means that we get to iron out the kinks in it, but also, because it’s highly automated, it’s very, very efficient so actually it’s really busy and what we’ve done is use other graders less, so we can use the big new one more.”

The new grader has been a culmination of a multi-year journey, combining the insights from earlier upgrades, especially the Bravo grader at the Washer Rd packhouse, and incorporating the latest advances in automation technology, vision grading systems and system control.

EastPack Quarry Road site manager Alan Davidson, left and EastPack CEO Hamish Simson. Photo / Stuart Whitaker

The old 10-lane grader was dismantled after the 2022 season, with a tight timeframe to build the new grader in time for 2023.

The new, 11-lane grader has improved defect detection to help maximise packouts and lowered packing costs per person employed.

“We started down [the] automation [road] seven years ago,” says Hamish.

“You learn something with each reiteration - you make some mistakes, you gain some insights. You always get a gain, but every time you make a bigger gain.

“And what we learn on this will actually go back to the big grader on Washer Rd and potentially make some more changes there, so each grader is kind of learning off each other.”

EastPack Quarry Rd site manager Alan Davidson says more and more elements are designed to be modular.

“So you can pick them up and, if it didn’t quite work in this environment, it can be repurposed somewhere else.”

Hamish says the new grader is the most complex for the company “by a long shot”.

“There are lots of conveyers going everywhere and it’s a step up in the control system.”

The company has also brought more design work in-house.

“So we’ve got some of our own bespoke engineering in there that we’ve built ourselves and the control system is very much to our design - so we’re doing a bit of our own stuff where it makes sense.

“If you don’t have a really good control of it as a network, you can get into trouble - so the more complex you get, the more sophisticated you have to get around your controls.”

Inevitably, the pandemic has impacted on the project.

“Big projects like this leave you awake at night, particularly with the overhang of Covid and lead times, which are still a bit horrible in a number of places, so to get it running on time and running well, it’s a great credit to the team here [at Quarry Rd].”

Nevertheless, a project that would potentially have take a year pre-Covid 19, has taken two years.

“And ... the cost has doubled on [the cost] if we had built this five years ago - so it’s been double the time and double the money.”

Nothing of the old grader on the site has been wasted.

“The front end is now in Ōpōtiki, which is good for Ōpōtiki as it’s got a lot more through-put. The palletising robot that it had is now sitting over in Collins Lane and the big 10-lane that was part of it will go into Washer Rd as part of an upgrade.”