BELDING, MI — An evolution of the apple industry demands that packers offer the very best technology to growers and the customers who have grown to have very high expectations.

In addition to apple varieties coming into the packinghouse, Belleharvest Sales Inc. continues to upgrade its grading and packing technology.

Christopher Sandwick, Belleharvest’s vice president of sales and marketing, said updated Compac electronic internal and external apple graders are replacing earlier versions of such technology this summer.

Christopher Sandwick, vice president of sales and marketing for Belleharvest Sales Inc., in trellised apple orchards in Belding, MI. “Consumption is our watch word. Every decision we make is guided by the desire to increase apple consumption,” Sandwick said. Having the varieties with unsurpassed grading, packing and storage technology to offer the highest quality and best flavors “is pretty important to that mission.”

This is the beginning of Sandwick’s third season with the firm, which is located here in Belding. Sandwick arrived with considerable experience in new apple varieties. He is applying that experience to help the growers that own Belleharvest.

“We are very happy with our progress on new varieties,” he said. Belleharvest is “developing relationships with the breeding programs around the world.” This has brought recent travels to New Zealand and various European programs. Furthermore, “we’ve met with all of the domestic programs. We have relationships with many of them and we are testing quite a few of the new varieties.”

Belleharvest growers are testing trees in their own orchards “to find the next great apple.” They are also forming partnerships to produce those varieties that consumers will want to eat more of.

“There is a renaissance for varieties,” he said. “You can’t sit on the sidelines.” This work “hopefully will drive change at retail. We need to eat more fruits and vegetables as consumers.” Sandwick credits many commodities within the produce industry for aggressive flavor development and strong branding efforts.

“We want the bar to be set high. We want stuff to taste good all of the time,” Sandwick said. Consumers “still have the perception that fresh is more expensive” than processed foods. “That is false. We have got to work harder. We have got to improve our messaging.”

As to the new internal and external apple grader, Mike Szyszko, who leads Belleharvest’s technical side, indicated the grader is a Compac CIR 9000. This features the latest LED lights, which allow 70 clear photos of every apple running through the line. These photographs, which are HD quality, read external color, find blemishes such as scab and stem punctures, and spots that will bruise, even if the bruise is not yet visible.

Szyszko said the Compac line runs 2,500 apples a minute. Considering that 70 photos are taken of each apple, the machine shoots 175,000 high-quality images a minute.

The machine’s infrared scanner catches rotten core, internal breakdown and watery core.

“This is a really, really, really fancy spectrometer,” Szyszko said. The machine can be adjusted “to give you the versatility for what you want to do.

“It’s a really expensive decoration if you don’t know how to use it,” Szyszko added.

He said apple researchers at Michigan State University are working on taking RFID technology to the orchard, working with GPS technology to help trace a fruit’s origin to a few square feet within the orchard.