Ingomar Packing Company

Overview  

Ingomar Packing Company is a leader in the global tomato industry. Their mission is to grow, process, and package the world’s finest tomato products. This commitment to quality has made them a trusted partner for food producers worldwide.

As Ingomar grew, they needed to further improve how they detect foreign material to remain a premium processor. This led to a new phase in their nearly 20-year partnership with TOMRA.

The Challenge: Quality at Scale

Tomato harvesting introduces many difficult contaminants, including:

• Drip tape
• Cotton stalks
• Stems
• Weeds
• Extraneous vegetation matter (EVM) 
• Metals
  ​

Manual sorting was slow and struggled to catch these items consistently. Ingomar needed a solution to improve product uniformity and strengthen customer trust.

The Impact: Quality and Efficiency  

1. Breakthrough Foreign Material Detection

The 5B catches a wide variety of materials and sizes that were previously missed.

Better Visibility: The system’s LED dome delivers unmatched illumination, ensuring maximum visibility of product defects and foreign material.

Higher Yield: Combined with advanced algorithmic analysis and smart ejection technology, the 5B minimizes false ejections while maximizing yield—delivering both quality and efficiency.

2. Spotting Subtle Color Differences

The 5B uses a comprehensive high-resolution camera system that consolidates inputs from multiple cameras to scan all objects and distinguish between subtle color differences across the product stream, improving the ability to identify defects earlier in the process.

3. AI for Identical Color Sorting

By integrating with artificial intelligence and creating a multi dimensional color space, the 5B can even distinguish between foreign material and acceptable food objects of a virtually identical color. An example would be red plastic material and red diced tomatoes. This enables a level of precision sorting that is truly unprecedented. “It is impressive to see the variety of different materials and sizes the machine can detect.” — Humberto Pulido, Production Maintenance Supervisor

4. Simplified Maintenance

The 5B’s open design makes it much easier for teams to clean. “Overall, it’s a good design—very few points were hard to clean,” says Pulido. 

5. User-Friendly Controls

By simplifying complex tasks, the TOMRA 5B has lowered total labor hours and generated significant cost savings for Ingomar. The proprietary XCD operator interface makes training and daily use intuitive, ensuring that new staff can get up to speed quickly.

Easy to Use: “We love TOMRA’s interface—it’s just so much easier to use,” says Crowley. 

Customized Sorting: The platform allows operators to build highly detailed sorting programs with fine criteria that target specific defects. Quick parameter adjustments give operators greater control over what is accepted or rejected.

Machine Learning: Once trained, the machine learning capability of the 5B retains definitions of “good” and “bad,” saving valuable time and improving accuracy.

Standardized Operations: The XCD interface is standardized across other TOMRA machines, including the 4C and 5C. This allows operators to switch seamlessly between systems, further reducing overall training needs