Apple ibag

My friends Philip and Myno and I toured the largest apple processing plant in Canada today. Here you see a picture of the stainless steel vats that hold the apple juice from the squeezed apples before it is pasterized and made into apple cider. This plant produces product for Loblaws and Walmart - the apples that you buy in those plastic bags. It cleans, selects the good ones, and bags the equivalent of about 4500 boxes that contain 100 apples each in an hour.
It starts with a 1000 pound bin of apples being imersed in water. The apples float out of the bin and proceed along the water trough conveyer system to go through an inspection machine at about 20 mph in which each apple has its picture taken about 7 times. It then travels along the high speed conveyor and is dropped in the water trough conveyor for that size of apple. The apple floats along the trough until 1000 pounds of apples have filled that select water trough. A robot then brings a bin which is about a cubic meter in size to the end of the trough and the apples pour in. These bins are then tagged according to the variety of apple and size, then put into storage.
At the other end of the plant, the bins are emptying their apples into the water trough once again as they will now be cleaned and bagged according to their size and variety. Even though there are 40 to 80 people working in the plant, a lot of the heavy work and sorting is done by robots. The slide show starts at the juice and cider area and you will see the byproduct of the apple juice, a fairly dry pulp after the juice is extracted. The juice goes through what looks like a radiator to raise its temperature to 89C for 20 seconds then immediately chilled. You will also see a large green door where they store the apples for up to 8 months - the oxygen is removed from the room and replaced with nitrogen so that they stay in a state of suspended animation without oxydizing. Click here to see the slide show - my friend Philip starts the show.