Storage/Staging: Europe’s biggest fruit producer implements the FIFO method

The agricultural cooperative society MIVOR has 400 members who produce about 500 million apples per year on an area of 1,100 hectares. Half of this amount is exported—to a total of 49 countries in Europe, North Africa and Asia. In light of tightened international competition and a merger of two of the cooperative’s biggest fruit producers, a new high-bay automated warehouse was built to more efficiently handle and sort large volumes of product.

Shortly after the merger, the MIVOR planning staff began a two-part project beginning with an innovative sorting system. The second part of the project included the construction of an automatic high-bay warehouse.

Fruit production follows a seasonal cycle. During the apple harvest in September, more than 300,000 bins with apples are cooled to 2° Celsius within a very short time. The warehouse’s oxygen-reduced controlled atmosphere cells allow long-term storage with almost no loss of freshness. Over the year, nearly the whole harvest is sorted by size, color, quality and then packaged.

The high-bay warehouse comes into play as a buffer between the sorting system and packaging area, where more than 100 employees accomplish very short delivery periods. Compared to the stacking approach of the usual handling cells, six automatic stacker cranes now implement a first-in, first-out method, improving freshness by reducing time in storage by up to one week.

After the first harvest season, CEO Martin Pinzger calls it a “continuing wow-factor—everything is running better and faster than planned.”
The system now enables full process and product security and traceability of every apple back to the orchard. Customer complaints and storage time are at all-time low while the new facility consumes one third less energy.

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