If you are bold enough to call your invention the “BEST Genius” it had better be an amazing machine.
If you ask the people at the Old Dutch processing plant in Winnipeg, it is.
I asked plant manager Bill Bashucky “Is it the best machine and was it made by a genius?”
His reply: “Yes, absolutely to both questions.”
The BEST Genius is one of those machines that, while it’s pretty ordinary to people in the food business, blows my mind. And on my tour of the Old Dutch plant, I couldn’t help but hope whoever invented it is now a multi-millionaire.
The BEST Genius is an optical sorter. It has very high-quality cameras inside it that examine each chip. “We input to the computer system numbers related to brightness of colour and size of defect,” Bashucky explains. As the chips whiz by the camera — and they’re moving fast — “it can tell, numerically, anything over this certain size you want to reject it. Anything darker than this colour, reject it.”
So if a sub-par potato chip gets through the first inspection, then the slicer and the fryer, the BEST Genius is on guard to remove it with just a carefully targeted puff of air. Genius!
“It compares the (chip) to the computerized parameters and if it’s outside of the parameters, an air blast knocks it right out before it gets to the other side of the conveyor,” says Bashucky.
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Up until the late 1970s, that job was done by about 20 people. Now, the BEST Genius that Old Dutch installed three years ago can assess 1,450 kilograms of chips an hour (by my calculation, about 850,000 chips).
At the Old Dutch plant in Winnipeg, it earns the title of Most Valuable Machine.
“In terms of quality and total machinery, yes absolutely,” Bashucky says.
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BTW: This is how they made our cameraman Gage dress for the tour. Beard nets are amazing.
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