THE ISRAELI PATENTS THAT HELP KENYAN AVOCADO GROWERS

The advanced technologies of Eshet Eilon, including special Near-Infra-Red sensors, improve the capabilities of packinghouses in Kenya

Eshet Eilon from Israel, one of the leading companies in the field of post-harvest technologies, has been working with African farmers for years.

Many of the packing houses in Africa, including a great number of places in Kenya, have been using the services of Eshet Eilon for decades, receiving from them the help that is needed to adjust the right technologies and post-harvest methods to the type of harvest and to the complexities of each place.

Eshet Eilon has a local representative who takes care of all the day-to-day needs of the packing houses in Kenya and other countries in the continent. Additionally, Eshet Eilon has significant storing space, which helps for the distribution of produce in order to try and decrease waste of fruits and vegetables.

Importantly, Eshet Eilon has been combining both refurbished and new equipment for sorting, grading and packaging fruits and vegetables. This allows for lower costs in packinghouses where the budget is limited. One of the systems developed by the company, called Eshet Optica, uses optical sensors and cameras during the sorting process. The system allows for great detail on each fruit and vegetable, such as their shape, color, texture and other visible defects. Through this technology it is possible to sort both fruits and vegetables and exclude those with significant defects, which could include a wide variety of visual defects, such as irregular shape, color or size.

Eshet Eilon collaborates with a wide range of research institutions, in order to develop more advanced and instrumental technologies. One of Eshet Eilon’s collaborations is with the Volcani Institute in Israel and the Institute of Agricultural Engineering of Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture.

It is due to this collaboration that Eshet Eilon has come out with one of the most outstanding tools for post-harvesting processes. This new technology, a Near-InfraRed (NIR) system, makes the lives of packinghouses easier and allows for better results by sorting fruits according to their internal qualities. This system uses unique wavelengths to penetrate into the fruits or vegetables and acquire all the necessary information regarding their chemical properties, thus giving us a precise indication of the quality of the fruit is. This kind of technology has brought a significant improvement in the post-harvesting world, by providing necessary information on fruits and vegetables with high accuracy, reliability and speed.