Hectre is always striving for innovation in order to offer our growers the best platform for orchard management. That’s why we’re excited to share the we’ve been hard at work developing a tool to bring presizing visibility to warehouses before fruit leaves the orchard. This feature will be an addition to the QC module of the app. It will enable growers to determine fruit size distribution of the full bin by using a sample of visible fruit on the top layer of the bin in real time.

How is this supposed to work? Well, you just use your mobile phone or tablet and take a photo of the bin in front of you. That’s it! Your app will tell you the exact fruit size distribution of that bin.

We believe using this technology is a unique opportunity for growers to understand fruit size before leaving the orchard. Fruit growers will benefit from:

• Improved planning in the warehouse as time consuming and expensive presizing belong in the past
• Streamlined packing as there will be less size variation across the grader
• Saved time by reducing the need to change the grader to a new setup in the packhouse
• Reduced labour cost as less variation across the grader means less staff needed
• Timely & accurate information for marketing and sales so higher rate commitments & deals are locked in sooner
• Reduced waste and costs of packing unselling fruit

Generally speaking, the forecasting & planning will be more precise. And all of that by just being able to take a photo of a bin and let the computer do the rest of the work.

After almost 2 years of planning, months of data capture, building the model and development, we named Hectre’s fruit size computer vision tool “Spectre”. We thought “Hectre Spectre” had a nice ring to it. Don’t you?