Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/491350
34 STiR tea & coffee industry international The Satake Group was founded in 1896 when Riichi Satake invented Japan's first power-driven rice milling machine. The company expanded into optical sorting when it acquired ESM, a step that also firmed up its presence in North America as Satake USA. Xeltron, one of the younger equipment manufacturers in this category, turns 40 this year. Andrea Castañeda, daughter of the founder and president of Xeltron, describes her company this way: "We manufacture sorting machines, nothing else." Headquar- tered in Costa Rica, this company's machines are popular with small-to-medium sized growers. The youngest of the equipment manufacturers at this year's show is considered an industry leader despite its relative youth. Delta Technology has built optical sorters since 1978. Sorters look alike Comparing technologies is difficult. Each manufacturer publishes brochures that de- scribe optics, lighting sources, power usage, and more. Yet all guard against revealing specific details about many of these features. An apples-to-apples comparison is im- possible without spending hours reading through patent applications or hiring a team of engineers to take the machines apart. "Sorters all look the same in the catalog, even down to the colors," Rafael ob- served. "It's really difficult for customers to separate them. I feel for them. It's a huge investment and there is an order of magnitude of difference between what goes on inside of them that isn't at all apparent from the catalog." Anyone picking up the product litera- ture at trade shows would agree. Careful attention to whether a pricier model or add-ons meets a buyer's requirements is crucial since most manufacturers offer several models. For example, Bühler continues to sell its hugely successful SORTEX Z+ ma- chines — which rank among the most accurate, high-volume sorters available. "Yet we found a growing need to re- move foreign material and subtle defects with even greater accuracy," said Rafael, "That's where the multiple configuration of the SORTEX A MultiVision shines. [It] is the first sorter that [uses] multiple wavelengths of light, including our en- hanced InGaAs technology, and specific wavelengths to enhance the subtle differ- ences between the coffee and its defects." The Evolution RGB line is the lat- est for Satake USA. The RGB stands for red-green-blue and is a reference to the fact this sorter relies on a full-color cam- era calibrated to the international color chart of the Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage in France. Conventional sorters rely on filters. Johanna Bot, direc- tor of vision systems marketing in Latin America for Satake USA explained, "We can define colors very precisely. The color you see in Colombia is defined in exactly the same manner compared with a customer sorting coffee in Hamburg." Satake Evolution 4-4450 sorter. Sorted green coffee samples at Xeltron booth at 27th Sintercafé.