751876Innovative fruit checking technology for high speed packing - FruitmatchClosedVouchersInnovate UKUK supermarket fresh fruit & veg waste is 60,000 tpa = £80M. One way to reduce waste is sale of smaller packs of ready to eat (RTE) fruit that give consumer confidence in fruit quality. RTE packing requires 100% manual inspection to match ripeness, firmness & colour uniformity, but suffers problems with labour availability & turnover, variable standards adherence & operator fatigue, leading to high costs and variable quality conformance. We believe there is a significant opportunity for an automated approach to final sorting & presentation of RTE fruit, reducing waste & cost while increasing consumer appeal & sector growth. The new technology would be deployed in our pack-house businesses to enable us to improve quality and consistency of our RTE fruit packs. This new technology would provide us with patentable IP. We aim to roll out the technology to the EU and possibly eventual global distribution. It would also benefit consumer health by increasing fruit & veg consumption.