Greenyard combines checkweighing with inspection for better frozen produce yield

Belgium’s Greenyard Frozen has deployed Mettler-Toledo equipment from weighing to metal detection on its lines, saving nearly 2kg of product per minute for fast payback.

Processing and packing fruit and vegetables for international markets, Greenyard Frozen Belgium, based in Westrozebeke needed to address the challenges associated with overfilling and giveaway on its high-speed lines.

Greenyard’s packaging process involves bulk vegetables passing through metal detectors to inspect for contamination, followed by checkweighers to verify package weight before boxing.

Overfilling had become unmanageable, with the company adding an extra 40g per one-kilo bag as a safety margin to avoid underfilling. But this margin quickly accumulated to tons of wasted food annually. Manual adjustments proved inefficient and failed to maintain close adherence to target weights, prompting the need for a more precise, automated system.

Mettler-Toledo piloted the smart fill level adjustment feature on its C33 PlusLine checkweigher. This continuously monitors the average package weight and automatically adjusts the multihead weigher’s fill margin from 40g to 10g per one-kilo bag. As a result of this pilot, Greenyard ended up installing the technology on six packaging lines.

Technical manager in Greenyard’s packaging department Dominiek Vierstraete explains that the company has been using Mettler-Toledo checkweighing and metal detection for many years.

“We initially tested the smart level fill adjustment feature on one of our newer checkweighers,” he says. “The results were so convincing that we decided to replace four older devices and integrate this function across all packaging lines.”

The savings have been clear, says the customer. On one of the lines, the overweight decreased from 0.69% to 0.14%. “That may not seem like much but calculated annually over large volumes, it represents significant quantities of product no longer packaged unnecessarily,” says Vierstraete.   “This benefits both cost and waste reduction.”

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