Anyone visiting MSP Onions’ new facility on the Zeeland coast can get a glimpse of the future: the new production line from machine builder Eqraft enables the company to sort and pack onions entirely automatically. Director Lindert Moerdijk talks about his brand-new factory.

A few years ago, Lindert and his colleagues encountered difficulties that will be familiar to many an entrepreneur in the agricultural industry: customers at home and abroad were imposing increasingly strict quality requirements and wanted 100% tracking & tracing. At the same time, labor was becoming more and more expensive and MSP was struggling with undercapacity. Sluggish machines that always needed changing over and which could not be used in the interim aggravated the problem. For the young Lindert, it was clear that something had to change: automation was needed, and sooner rather than later. So he made a list of everything that the ideal factory of the future had to be able to do: sort and pack rapidly and continuously, with full traceability, in an automated factory building without forklifts. The price tag? About 20 million euros.

MSP Onions is a family business founded in 1983 by three brothers: Lindert’s father and his uncles. His two cousins work in the business as well. At first they called him crazy when he presented them with his plan, but once Lindert’s proposal had been calculated and verified, they changed their tune. From the start, it was clear to MSP that Eqraft – together with renowned parties like Modesta and Symach – had to build the new factory. ‘The only way to drastically improve sorting quality is with an optic sorting machine. We knew that Eqraft was the only one who could help us with that,’ says Lindert. We also wanted an overarching software layer that enabled all the machines to communicate with each other and made it unnecessary to have forklifts driving around.

Guaranteed quality

Building this factory of the future required quite a bit of work and effort. Not only because of the size of the project – the new facility had to be designed and realized from the ground up, including the new building – but a change in management at Eqraft and the coronavirus crisis also complicated the process. Despite some delays, after about four years MSP and Eqraft finally started trial operations. The result of their collaboration? A brand-new factory building (next to the old one, which is still in use) but with no fewer than 16 sorting lines, which run each individual onion under a camera. Six photographs are taken of every onion, and infrared technology is used to check the interior of the onion as well. Lindert: ‘We can assign them to no fewer than seventeen quality qualifications, based on all sorts of characteristics: from coloring and firmness to disease symptoms.’ The new line can sort as many as 160 onions per second, making it the only machine in the world that can check the onion both internally and externally at this speed. Or, as Lindert puts it: ‘You may well say that you offer quality onions, but this machine means that you can guarantee it.’ 

Tripled capacity

The production line also has an advanced track & trace system that provides the factory owner with detailed information that can be traced to each crate. The internal logistics are fully software-operated, which means that movements using forklifts have been reduced by no less than 60%. The entire production line can be turned on or off at the push of a button, and switching between different settings is just a matter of clicking on the right option: that means no more change-over time. ‘The old packing line processed about 35 tons per hour; the new one runs at about 120 tons per hour,’ Lindert reports enthusiastically. ‘The sorting machine checks 60 tons of onions per hour. We currently only need seven people to operate everything, including cleaning and the technical service,’ he says. ‘The optic sorter also helps pull the rotten and unusable onions from a batch, which means they can be recycled. Some 75% of the tare weight is processed into food and the other 25% goes into the biodigester.’ The factory of the future is also considerably more sustainable, therefore.

New possibilities

What do all these improvements mean for MSP Onions? ‘It opens doors that were closed before,’ says Lindert. The high sorting quality means he can filter out the very best onions from a batch and put them on the transport. ‘This allows us to ship onions to countries on the other side of the world, like Brazil, with much less risk. Previously, we did not dare to do that because of the five-week transit time, but now we can guarantee the quality of our product. This makes the world substantially smaller, without increasing the risks.’ MSP can also continue supplying its current sales areas for longer: many countries switch to different suppliers in the spring, but thanks to the new production line, the company can guarantee quality throughout the year.

The future of MSP Onions? According to Lindert, things are looking rosy, because since Eqontrol gets smarter with every new piece of information, the results can only improve. ‘We started running in September and at that time, the Eqrader’s margin of error was still 2%: we’ve now reduced that to 0.2%.’ Until now, his company is one of the few in the Netherlands able to sort onions based on internal quality as well, but the number of companies doing this will undoubtedly increase in the future, Lindert predicts: ‘The changing climate with long wet and dry periods calls for a boost in quality, which is why I think European supermarkets will be requiring internal quality sorting in the next two years.’ If that happens, MSP, in any event, is completely prepared.