The country is moving to bolster its avocado and macadamia nuts market in China, capitalising on a surge in exports and the growing demand for these products in the Asian country.
DIVERSIFIED agro-industrial company, Ariston Private Limited, has started using artificial intelligence (AI) in its macadamia nuts operations to improve efficiency and product quality postharvest.
This comes after Ariston recently said it was banking on the growing global demand for macadamia nuts following the Covid-19-induced oversupply.
It also comes as the country is moving to bolster its avocado and macadamia nuts market in China, capitalising on a surge in exports and the growing demand for these products in the Asian country. During a recent media tour at Ariston’s macadamia estates in Chipinge, Manicaland Province, the company’s head of engineering, Gibbs Manyukwa, highlighted how AI is transforming their sorting process.
“Here we are employing artificial intelligence in our macadamia sorting. We use a scanner, which is a new technology that we have brought into this country, where we use Valafive, the most recent technology that has been introduced in China.
“We have got a machine here that grades our nuts by taking a photo of every nut that we produce. We take it through the machine and we are counting all the nuts individually, and we are doing like five turns every hour, where we detect every defect that is in the nut, record it, and grade them accordingly.
“So at this given time, now we have the latitude to give each customer a product that suits their specification, because we now have the equipment that can help us to do exactly that. Now we can manage our harvest, post-harvest, we can manage our product post-harvest,” Manyukwa said.
Meanwhile, Ariston’s head of agriculture, Gary Thirkettle, said the company is planning to expand its banana plantations to meet local market demand. “Basically, with our current banana plantation, we are busy with a rejuvenation process. We are actively rejuvenating our banana plantation and then our plan is towards the end of this year we will start our banana expansion.
“This is a key focus, it is a good part of our business, although it is not very big, It certainly makes a big contribution … “Currently, we have 48 hectares and we are quite focused on the local market.
We had a plan on a budget to get up to 200 hectares. “The idea is to add bananas almost every month. If you plant a big chunk at one time, the bananas become ripe at one time and that is not what we want, we want a progressive system,” Thirkettle said.