Sharpening its category focus, TOMRA Food appoints new sales manager for citrus

New appointment in California reflects TOMRA's regional and global commitment to tailoring its solutions to food categories' specialized needs

TOMRA Food announced the appointment of James Lynch as Area Sales Manager for Citrus in California, where TOMRA works with many customers specializing in lemons, oranges, mandarins, and other citrus varieties. This follows the appointment last year of Clinton Jeffries to the newly-created role of Global Category Director for Citrus.

Lynch's appointment is the latest move in TOMRA Food's strategy to precisely tailor sorting and grading solutions to the specialized needs of food categories. He moves into his new role after five years as a solutions engineer at TOMRA Food. He will work closely with the other Area Sales Manager for Citrus in California, Simon Rhyner. Both will also work with Californian customers who grow and pack large stone fruit.

James Lynch Area Sales Manager for Citrus

James Lynch and Clinton Jeffries

Clinton Jeffries said: "James's can-do attitude, relentless work ethic, and desire to put the customer first have rightly earned him the opportunity to take on this new challenge. His understanding of packhouses in general, and specifically citrus and stone fruit line design, will bring immediate value to customers as he works closely with them on new projects and optimization of existing installs."

James Lynch said: "Clinton and Simon have set the bar for customer support in our area, and I look forward to delivering that same quality of engagement. As an engineer, I spent many hours in packhouses and worked on various layouts for citrus and stone fruit customers. With this technical background, I will be able to help customers in my new role. TOMRA Food sees its relationships with customers as a collaborative process - we want them to be heard and part of the design process."

Citrus challenges in California and elsewhere

In California alone, TOMRA Food typically installs up to 200 new lanes at citrus packhouses yearly. TOMRA's integrated post-harvest solutions are also widely used by citrus packhouses in Australia, South Africa, South America, and Spain. Sales are growing in developing markets such as China, North Africa, and Turkey.

Jeffries commented: "In California and across the world, our citrus customers face big challenges around water resources and labor issues, and are under pressure to deliver high quantities with high quality. TOMRA's sharp focus on citrus can help packers maximize yield, lower costs and waste streams, and profitably feed the world.

"To support our customers, we have a fantastic new purpose-built facility in Visalia, California, in the heart of the Central Valley's citrus and stone fruit area. Here we keep a huge inventory of spare parts, run equipment demonstrations, train customers to get the best from their equipment, and help keep customers' lines running day and night with our Customer Care Center and Field Service teams."

The fruit industry's most advanced sorting platform is the recently-launched TOMRA 5S Advanced. This builds on the class-leading performance of Compac's Multi Lane Sorter (TOMRA acquired Compac in 2016) but was redesigned from the ground up, with a focus on ease of cleaning and maintenance. The company's Spectrim sorter and grader is also ideally suited to citrus fruits and has long been recognized as the standard-setter in blemish-grading vision systems.

TOMRA Food's category-by-category focus

TOMRA Food is sharpening its focus on customers' challenges by introducing Global Category Directors to develop even more precisely tailored solutions. In addition to Clinton Jeffries's role overseeing Citrus, the TOMRA Food team includes other Global Category Directors for apples (Damien Gibson), avocados (Jacinto Trigo), blueberries (Joshua Miers-Jones), cherries (Benedetta Iamino), kiwifruit (Tim Grieve), nuts and dried fruit (Brendan O'Donnell), potatoes (Marco Colombo), and tomatoes (Roberto Ricci).

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