Image from left to right: Patrick Archibeque, President & CEO, Brian Machado, Owner, Vice President & Salesman, Albert Dal Porto, Farm Manager, Chiles Wilson, Owner & Chairman
As a cherry packer, you want the best of all worlds. Superior product consistency, maximum production capacity and the most efficient operation possible. As a leader in the cherry industry, Rivermaid Trading Company is constantly innovating to meet their customer’s demands and deliver the highest returns to their growers while reducing their operating costs. With the investment in a 24-lane Elifab cherry grading machine and the latest Ellips True-AI grading technology, Rivermaid has ensured a promising future for their growers, customers and their own operation.
"Although our expectations were high, the line did even better than expected. The 24-lane Elifab grader is running well over 20 tons per hour without any manual sorters"
Patrick Archibeque | Rivermaid
Growth strategy with a powerful brand promise and collaborations
For Rivermaid, this AI-driven cherry grading machine represents more than just a new piece of equipment; it’s a key component in their strategy to grow their cherry business by enhancing the capabilities and flexibility of their packing operation. The increased efficiency and capacity allow them to expand production while maintaining their commitment to high-quality products. This approach aligns perfectly with Rivermaid's brand promise and strengthens their relationships with growers, retailers and consumers. Rivermaid’s success is a testament to the power of collaboration in the fruit industry.
Over the past few years, Rivermaid has faced the following challenges:
• California cherries, known for their complex color patterns and varying maturity levels, have long posed challenges for packers striving to maintain consistency and high throughput.
• The cherry market has very strict quality requirements that must be achieved. You need cutting-edge technology that can accurately capture the quality, size, firmness, brix and color of your cherries with an eye for the smallest details.
• The need to serve a variety of customers and markets. They demand different quality standards so you must have extreme flexibility to adapt your grading to meet their diverse needs.
• Maintaining a high production volume is crucial to stay in the business. Increasing capacity while reducing costs is our top priority for growth. You want to be able to process your cherries as quickly as possible to cut costs, save time and keep margins attractive.
• Despite varying growing and weather conditions which can impact quality, you must be able to deliver consistent quality to your customers. Ellips’ grading technology ensures that we can consistently deliver the high-quality cherries that our customers expect.
Every challenge has it’s solution.
Following are just some of the improvements that Rivermaid achieved:
✅ Increased throughput due to the faster processing speed. The 24-lane Elifab grader is running well over 20 tons per hour without any manual sorters
✅ Enhanced ability to react to dynamic customer demands while optimizing returns by ensuring that every cherry ends up in its rightful place
✅ Improved quality consistency with powerful AI defect detection of challenging defects, including black rot, fresh cracks, and stem area cracks
Discover Rivermaids' improvements in this video
Read the full story of Rivermaid business transformation.
About Rivermaid
Growers. Packers. Shippers. Leaders. Rivermaid Trading Company is well known as a leading supplier of consistent high-quality cherries and as California’s number one pear grower. Rivermaid is a family farming business with expertise in agriculture, operations, consumer marketing, logistics and more. Rivermaid shares a passion for doing whatever it takes to put the best tasting pears and cherries on your tables throughout the world. Today, as always, every piece of fruit from Rivermaid is grown with care, picked by hand, packed to the highest quality standards and produced in a socially and environmentally responsible fashion.
Focus on world-leading grading technology and highly skilled operators
Lodi California is an ideal location for growing cherries due to its excellent combination of soil, water, and climate. This environment allows cherries to mature with a deep red color and high sugar levels. Rivermaid is dedicated to investing in world-leading grading technology to deliver consistently high-quality packages. Additionally, they are targeting highly skilled operators to manage operations. These operators are trained to detect even the most challenging defects, including black rot, fresh cracks, and stem area cracks. They also determine brix, firmness, and color, ensuring the best packout reaches consumers.
A leading cherry and pear grower with big volumes
Rivermaid represents approximately 14% of the California cherry industry. The packers operate from three different locations in the heart of their growing areas with a combined footprint of 400,000 square feet. The facilities include 5 pear and 3 cherry packing lines, air-forced cooling tunnels and 150,000 square feet of racked cold storage with ethylene monitoring to ensure optimum storage conditions. Rivermaid uses modified atmosphere (MA) technology to create an unsurpassed long-term storage environment.
Main Goals and Challenges
The primary objectives to address include labor issues, consistent quality and increased operational capacity. Following are the key points associated with each goal:
1. Taking major automation steps to reduce dependence on labor
“Reducing labor is a crucial goal. These days, and all over the world, it’s very hard to find labor. We don’t want to be dependent on this anymore. Labor is getting harder every year. Our operation requires a significant amount of labor, leading to substantial costs. Rivermaid employs approximately 65 to 70 full -time employees each day. During the cherry and pear season, we ramp up to around 650 to 700 employees during that time frame. Labor shortages are making it increasingly difficult, compelling us to further automate.”
2. Ensuring consistent quality under all challenging conditions
“Cherries in California are very challenging to sort and grade because of a mixed manifest of color, defects and sizing. Most regions in the world don't experience what California's cherries possess. California's cherries are also affected by climate pattern changes, causing fruit to mature at different times on the same tree. Due to labor challenges, we usually have to complete the harvest in a single pass. These complex color patterns and varying maturity levels, have long posed challenges for packers striving to maintain consistency and high throughput.
3. Scaling up our business by increasing production volume
“Maintaining high production volume is crucial for staying competitive in the business. Achieving substantial volume is our top growth priority. We need reliable machines and equipment that allow us to scale. Currently, we hold a significant market share in California and will continue to expand if we deliver for our growers. Since we partly rely on growers for our supply, building strong relationships with them is essential. Understanding the importance of quality, we invested our time and resources in finding the best grading and packing machine available. We sought a powerful machine that combines high throughput with accurate grading for quality. This strategic decision will pay off by allowing us to handle increased volumes effectively. Last but not least, it provides the highest payout to the growers we partner with.”
Choosing the right partner & technology
Rivermaid's relationship with Ellips began in 2012 during a trip to Chile, where the team first encountered Ellips optical sorting and grading technology. Since their first installation in 2014, Rivermaid has been at the forefront of adopting Ellips’ innovative developments. In total, Rivermaid utilizes 106 lanes of Ellips technology at their operation. This is their fourth line with Ellips technology, but it's the first to incorporate Elifab's hardware.
Synergy between Ellips and Elifab
“Elifab constructed all the hardware for the machine, from the dump tanks to the sorting and packing tables. Essentially, the Elifab system manages all the mechanical aspects of grading the fruit. Ellips complements this by providing all the software and technology, integrating seamlessly to ensure smooth operation. The integration of Elifab's hardware with Ellips grading and sorting technology has created a synergy that maximizes throughput while maintaining high quality standards. Elifab’s advanced singulation system ensures optimal positioning of each cherry for imaging, resulting in more accurate grading and sorting on the new 24 lane Elifab machine.”
Complete confidence of this significant investment
“I've known Fabricio from Elifab since 2012. During the design phase of the project, he sent his team, including representatives, here three times. Additionally, my team and I traveled to their installations around the world, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, to not only view the machines but also to speak with the owners and operators.
What were the main motivations for choosing Ellips|Elifab?
1. You can rely on AI. It kind of runs itself.
“Batch qualities vary, but customer demand remains consistently high. California cherries pose unique challenges with varying maturity and complex color patterns. Previously, extensive human grading hours were required to sort by quality and color. However, with the latest AI technology, we significantly reduced the labor needed to operate the machines. This advancement has also led to noticeable enhancements in the consistency and quality of our outgoing product.”
"We don’t have to worry and don't have to spend the resources really checking the fruit to the same degree that we do on our other lines. You can rely on AI. It kind of runs itself in terms of grading."
Hayden Gibson | Rivermaid
2. The Power of AI in detecting challenging defects
“Every cherry is unique. So is every defect. Internal and external defects occur in various forms. With so many ways defects can appear, only Ellips True-AI can accurately model all these combinations. It detects even the most challenging defects with precision, including black rot, fresh cracks, and stem area cracks. Additionally, it offers exceptional reliability in identifying stems, neighboring stems, and stem attachment points.”
3. Increase the pace with even faster processing speed
“Speed is everything, but never at the expense of our delicate cherries. The Elifab grader provides the highest throughput, delicate handling and ensures perfect singulation. This guarantees each cherry is optimally positioned for imaging, leading to more accurate grading. Another advantage of AI is the speed it brings to the grading process. AI technology significantly enhances our production line by increasing throughput.”
What else do we appreciate about the Elifab cherry grader?
✅ The entire machine line is designed for gentle handling of cherries.
✅ Automatic box fillers offer smart automation for the packaging process.
✅ The machine's compact footprint is highly practical for your packhouse.
✅ Inline hydrocoolers deliver additional cooling for the cherries before boxing.
✅ Robust construction and high-quality materials ensure long-lasting durability.
Results
Following are just some of the improvements that Rivermaid achieved:
✅ Increased throughput due to the faster processing speed. The 24-lane Elifab grader is running well over 20 tons per hour without any manual sorters.
✅ Enhanced ability to react to dynamic customer demands while optimizing returns by ensuring that every cherry ends up in its rightful place.
✅ Improved quality consistency with powerful AI defect detection of challenging defects, including black rot, fresh cracks, and stem area cracks.
Customers experience the Rivermaid difference
“Business is all about relationships, whether it's on the sales side or your supply side with our growers. Our goal is to expand our cherry business by providing a consistent high-quality product for our end consumers, such as grocery stores and distributors. Ellips plays a crucial role in this by allowing us to expand our production with the extra efficiencies that we've gotten from this Elifab grading machine.”
The confidence of growers to be part of the packhouse
"Ultimately, the more sorting lanes you have, the more fruit you can pack, enabling you to better serve your customers. Rivermaid is recognized as a quality packer, deeply committed to the contents of each box. While others may also care, we take immense pride in this. Growers trust that when they send their fruit to Rivermaid, it will be packaged to the highest quality standards, and our end consumers are well aware of this commitment."
The role of an operator has been significantly simplified
“The new AI-driven machine has significantly eased my job, and I believe everyone here would agree. We save time with certain tasks like finding stems, are more effective and AI discovers new things that could not have been done before. For example. The new AI software works really well on fresh splits. These were impossible to take out with the previous cherry technology. While we experienced some initial growing pains, the Elifab and Ellips teams helped us resolve these issues. Now that the season is over, we are very happy with the machine's performance."
