The fruit and vegetable line, station by station.

A fruit and vegetable line prepares produce, freezes it quickly and packs it for retail or food service, and the time between harvest and freezing is often what decides quality. Produce arrives from the field, is sorted, washed and inspected, and stones and foreign material are removed. Root crops, fruit and some vegetables then pass through a peeler. Abrasive, steam, knife, brush or chemical peeling is chosen according to the crop, and peel loss directly affects yield. Leafy crops and beans skip peeling and go straight to trimming. Slicers and dicers then cut produce to the finished size: diced carrots, sliced beans, cut fruit or vegetable strips. Uniform cuts freeze and cook evenly and look better in the pack, while fines and slivers are a yield loss. Many vegetables are then blanched in hot water or steam to inactivate enzymes that would otherwise change colour and flavour in frozen storage, and are cooled straight afterwards. Sanitary conveyors link these operations. Produce is wet and often abrasive, so conveyors need open, easily cleaned frames, drainage and belts suited to wet product. Vibratory conveyors also spread product evenly across the freezer belt. The blast freezer, often a fluidised-bed or tunnel freezer for individually quick frozen product, freezes each piece separately so it pours freely from the bag. Fast freezing keeps texture and limits drip loss on thawing. Frozen product may be stored in bulk and repacked later. For retail packs, a multihead weigher portions frozen product into target weights, feeding a vertical form-fill-seal machine that makes bags from film. Frozen product is hard and can build up ice, so weighers and baggers need suitable contact surfaces and cold-rated parts. The checkweigher confirms every bag is within weight limits. Many plants also add metal detection or X-ray inspection at this point. Finally, cases are built into stable pallet loads by the palletiser, stretch wrapped and moved into frozen storage.