Customers

Target AG invest in AI to enhance customer satisfaction and efficiency

Written by John Albert | Jun 25, 2024 7:30:37 AM

Delivering consistently superior quality onions is always the top priority as your work to keep your customers happy. The quality obviously begins in the field and is highly dependent upon the dynamic growing and weather conditions you face every year. On the other hand, advanced grading and sorting technology is a crucial component in ensuring that the quality of our packed onions remains consistent regardless of the quality of the raw product. This technology is our insurance policy to ensure that your customers remain satisfied regardless of growing conditions or the quality of the product arriving from the field."


"In 2012, we were struggling with the performance and reliability of our existing grading technology and Erwin Bakker and John Albert helped our company transition to Ellips’ remarkable onion grading and sorting solution. The following year, Ellips Internal Quality technology made a dramatic difference in our ability to deliver consistent quality to our customers even as we dealt with significant internal quality issues during that season. Since those early years, we have maintained an excellent working relationship with Ellips."

"To keep pace with our continued growth and operational objectives, Target AG has continued
to embrace innovative processes and technology. For example, in 2023, we became an early adopter of artificial intelligence when we upgraded to Ellips’ True-AI technology which significantly improved the detection of challenging defects and product characteristics. This capability further enhanced our grading performance and ability to react to our customer’s unique quality standards."

For the upcoming season, Target AG will install a new Ellips/Elisam onion grading machine which will deliver additional capacity and the flexibility necessary to better serve their customers with two state-of-the-art onion sorting lines.

Over the past few years, Target AG has faced the following challenges:

  • The need to serve a variety of customers and markets. They demand different quality standards so you must have extreme flexibility in order to adapt your grading to meet their diverse needs.
  • The onion market has very strict quality requirements that must be achieved. You need cutting-edge technology that can accurately capture the external and internal quality of your onions with an eye for the smallest details . 
  • 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 onions that our customers expect.
  • 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 onions as quickly as possible to cut costs, save time and keep margins attractive.
  • Manual sorting and packing is extremely tedious, expensive and time consuming. It is critically important that your production capacity does not decrease and your costs due not increase due to product quality issues.


    Results


    Following are a few of the benefits that Target AG has achieved since its adoption of True-AI: 

    Improved quality consistency with powerful defect detection 

    Increased throughput due to the faster processing speed and lower costs due to a reduction in sorting labor 

    Enhanced ability to react to dynamic customer demands while optimizing returns by ensuring that every onion ends up in its rightful place