The UNITEC team, thanks also to its subsidiary UNITEC Chile, is working in collaboration with its clients to guarantee the high quality standards required by the market.
UNITEC's technological solutions, together with the tireless work of its team operating in Chile, are allowing its Clients to confidently face a cherry campaign that is proving to be one of the most difficult in recent years.
In fact, despite the fact that climate change has brought with it a rainy winter and a spring with very unstable temperatures, a record season for cherry exports from the South American country was still expected, thanks to the progressive increase in the surface area invested and despite the expected reduction in yields per hectare. However, the climatic factor also affected the harvest, with intense and prolonged rains causing enormous damage to the product in all production areas, to the point that estimates of marketable production are revised from one week to the next.
The most serious thing is that all the harvested lots have very significant damages, which can even reach 70% of the total, which took by surprise a production system that had not had such a negative impact on the quality of the harvested product for four years. Under these conditions, it was even more necessary, indeed vital, for the Chilean cherry industry to have the UNITEC CHERRY Vision 3 quality classification system, capable of ensuring compliance with the very high quality standards required by the main destination area for Chilean cherries, namely the Far East.
In this field, however, in addition to appropriate and efficient technologies, such as those proposed by UNITEC, it is equally vital (for fruit and vegetable plants that process cherries) to be able to count on timely assistance to adjust the software to the new conditions, thus guaranteeing a rapid result in line with current requirements.
In this fundamental and strategic aspect, UNITEC – thanks to its subsidiary in Chile, which currently has 70 professionals on site, in addition to the same number of specialized technicians providing support from the Company's headquarters – has made available to its Chilean Clients (since the beginning of the campaign) its experience, its competence and innovation acquired over 100 years of history; in fact, the UNITEC team works constantly to support the Chilean cherry industry in this central phase of the export period. And this important work has been strategic in order not to compromise the results related to the part of the product suitable for export, i.e. the part still suitable for distant markets. It would have been impossible (in these very difficult conditions) to obtain these results without the automated and reliable solutions developed and implemented by UNITEC. In addition to the normal work of supporting Clients in the start-up phase of the installations, which is already normally a race against time, this season an additional adjustment has been necessary to cope with the exceptional situation, to which the UNITEC team has once again managed to provide concrete, reliable and therefore winning responses for its Clients.
Nour Abdrabbo, Director of the Unitec Chile subsidiary and Commercial Director of the Group, says: «The Unitec team is committed to being close to our Clients every day and supporting them in this difficult season. We at UNITEC approach the Chilean cherry season every year like a Formula 1 race, for which we prepare with dedication through punctual maintenance interventions and putting into play every year a lot, a lot of innovation. We want to arrive trained and ready for the start, where our Team faces each challenge with speed, concentration and passion. This is because we have a single objective: to win together with our Clients, to overcome difficulties to obtain, for them, the best possible result given the initial conditions. And winning, for us at Unitec, means making our Clients and the Chilean industry in general win.»
In addition to the challenges, this campaign was also characterised by the introduction of important innovations in the range of integrated solutions that UNITEC makes available to the Chilean cherry industry. Firstly, with the development of robotic solutions along the supply chain to increasingly automate the process and, even more, with the introduction of an absolute novelty at the end of the line, namely the UNI Smart Seal automatic cherry bag sealer. UNI Smart Seal now represents the state of the art in this delicate phase and provides important support to the 14 warehouses that have adopted it, as it reduces the need for manpower on the line by combining a drastic reduction in fruit handling, an improvement in the precision of operations and high productivity (up to 14 boxes per minute), which translates into an improvement in the quality of the packaging and a great increase in efficiency at this stage of the process.
A solution that perfectly reflects the UNITEC style, a style that is born from the company's deep connection with the market and its Customers, facing their difficulties and demands together with them and providing quick and concrete responses in the common spirit of guaranteeing a quality consistent with the expectations of the end consumer.
