Orchid industry anticipates automation boost

Airborne Cymbidiums' Production Manager, Lee Omeli, ties up orchids prior to packaging. Automation could significantly speed up the packaging process.

Kumeu-based orchidist, Ian Floyd, is the managing director of the aptly-named orchid export company, Airborne Cymbidiums. Probably the best known and most widely grown of all the orchid varieties, the strong, bold colours and longevity of the Cymbidium orchid have seen it evolve from a funeral flower into a high-value fashion item, in demand worldwide for weddings, gifts and corporate ornamentation.

Though small by international standards, New Zealand has a flourishing orchid export industry and is recognised for its ability to supply high quality blooms in the northern hemisphere’s off-season.

Whilst orchids are actually hardier than they look, they are nonetheless prone to damage during the delicate process of packaging them in cellophane sleeves, ready for export around the world. Ian Floyd has been working over the last few years on an automated orchid sleeving project in order to improve the presentation of the final packaged product and speed up the process.

During the manual packaging process the orchid is handled four times. With the new sleeving machine handling will be reduced to two or three times, with far less likelihood of damage.

“The more times we handle a flower the more likely it is to be damaged in the process,” Ian Floyd says.

“An orchid is a high-value item in today’s market. It takes 12 months to grow a flower and in the last five hours on the property during the sleeving process the pollen caps can be removed and the petals can be damaged. The flower is then useless for export and has to be thrown away.”

Even worse, he says, is that if orchids are handdamaged on the packing day, the packers don’t always notice the damage – a crack on the petal or a pollen cap that has broken off (if the pollen cap is removed the flower will die). The flowers can be packed into a box, taken off the property and shipped around the world in the dark, only to be found to have died when the box is opened up three
days later.

Ian received funding through a FRST^[?] grant and approached DeviceWorks to fine-tune his designs late last year. Work began on a prototype sleeving
machine in February.

Jason van Beurden, DeviceWorks’ Project Manager, says that there were several challenges along the way in developing the prototype.

“From a technical point of view, the trickiest part of the process was sleeve handling. These sleeves are supplied in a pre-cut stack and needed to be
individually picked up, opened and placed on the chute without human intervention.

“To achieve this, a pick and place system incorporating a special vacuum manifold system was developed, along with a ‘spreader’ unit which mechanically opens the sleeve to its full extent and places the bag on the end of the chute.”

Ian says that his desire to create a future-proof packing machine that can be adapted to use environmentally-friendly and recyclable packaging was part of the challenge for DeviceWorks.

“I’m pretty passionate about this and I foresee that our entire packaging line in the future will be recyclable. My core focus is growing flowers though, and instead of trying to chase my tail as I had been, I was able to give this project to the people who were capable of doing the job.”

Trials of the new prototype begin in November, with many of the other orchid exporters around the country watching developments with interest.