Bühler facilitates Chinese market expansion for Royal Quinoa processing giant

Phil Black - PII Editor 15/04/2021

223 2 minutes read

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Bolivia-based Andean Valley Corporation attributes its successful entry into the Chinese market to its investment in Bühler's Sortex optical sorting technology. The company has also seen a more than two-fold increase in its processing capacity, as well as ongoing expansion of its product portfolio and a significant improvement in its colour sorting.

Boosting capacity

Since the Covid pandemic began, Andean Valley has experienced a drastic increase in demand for its Royal Quinoa, recording its highest ever sales in the company history. “With our Sortex technology we have been able to meet this rise in demand,” says Javier Fernandez Villalobos, CEO, President and Owner of Andean Valley Corporation. Indeed, with the highest capacity optical sorting solution for quinoa in the market, Andean Valley has more than doubled its processing capacity, from two to five metric tons per hour.

With its expandable and modular structure, Sortex optical sorting technology enables higher product throughput without compromising on the accept product quality. Additionally, the flexible configuration allows the product to have multiple passes, enabling Andean Valley to obtain a much more concentrated reject. Subsequently, the company has been able to recover approximately five metric tons of accept quality quinoa every month.

Improved colour sorting

The main challenge that the company faced prior to its Sortex investment was detection and removal of immature pale green and overly mature pale pink grains, which are both very similar in colour to the main white quinoa.

With Bühler’s RGB camera sensors, Andean Valley is now able to detect very slight colour variations, with a clear image. The patented algorithm allows the operator to easily select which defect to remove, without touching any other colour. Moreover, the Sortex machine continuously tracks the product colour, enabling automatic calibration of camera gains and background references.

The Chinese market

Not only has Sortex colour sorting supported small farmers in Bolivia, but also Andean Valley’s export markets. Currently the company exports its Royal Quinoa to 13 countries. However, without Sortex technology, Fernandez states that it would have certainly failed to enter the Chinese market.

“The Chinese market demands a stringent separation of black, red and white quinoa; thanks to Bühler’s advanced colour sorting we can guarantee that. Today we are able to comfortably fulfil our existing demand and also demand from China.”

Looking ahead

Fernandez concludes: “With our Sortex stamp of high quality, we are looking to further expand into new markets that have an organic, high quality food interest. Additionally, we are in the finishing stages of installing our first gluten-free pasta line and a smoothie line”.