Mayson Enterprises, a provider of automation, announced its partnership with Kingsville’s, Agro PAK Solutions to provide the integration between automotive assembly automation and the greenhouse vegetable sector. Currently, the local greenhouse industry is the largest agricultural employer in the area, and the most reliant on domestic and foreign workers. Higher wages and a shrinking pool of workers are costing the industry millions in lost sales and threatening its profitability and the industry’s ability to grow.
Although assembly-handling robots are nothing new to the automotive industry, Agro PAK Solutions aims to bridge the greenhouse pack production with automotive automation best practices and coined its pre-pack assemble automation services.
Through this strategic partnership, Mayson Enterprises and Agro PAK Solutions Inc. can upgrade a manual packing plant to a facility with pre-programmed robots that pick and place produce in pre-determined packaging format like flow wrapper or clamshell producing more units per minute with a maxim output past 8 hours work day shift. Fewer people mean a smaller human resources budget to run the operation.
Agro PAK Solutions' founder Dio Gomez has over 20 years of experience in Ontario’s automotive industry. Growing up in Leamington, Ontario, he worked after school at one of the local produce packing sheds. Later, he moved away to work in the automotive industry. In 2010, after visiting a local greenhouse grower, he thought of combining and applying automotive automation best practices to orientating bell peppers for bagging. Today, he has designed, built, and patented a machine that offers reliability, simplicity, and serviceability to orientate peppers. He is the CA/MX/US Patent holder for fruit orientation preparation to get produce through the pre-pack process without stopping for manual handling but instead touched only once at the time of harvest and providing retailers the freshest produce possible with less handling.
Read the complete article at www.leamingtongrower.com.