Yuma leads way for new food safety innovations

This week’s Home Grown segment shows us how the demand for safer food leads to more technological innovations in Yuma.

News 11 gives us a look at how the agriculture industry is constantly evolving.

When most people think of food safety they think of what’s being done in the fields, when really food safety goes well beyond the fields.

“Food safety in the field is only one part of it but it’s humongous,” George Cabrera, operations manager at Growers Custom Equipment told News 11.

His company had developed a new machine that cleans the plastic bins that carry product from the fields to the process plants.

It’s a portable bin washer.

“It starts from the plant,” he said. “They dump their product in the wash lines then the containers come outside and get picked up and they go through this rotator that rotates two bins at the same time and they are flipped upside down for the bin to go through the washer, cleaning the inside, and then it gets flipped over again and there is another sanitizer with a sensor on it and it goes through it and the sanitizer spray is the final spray,” he said.

As more companies start using plastic bins instead of cardboard boxes to transport food from the fields, this adds an extra step in making sure the bins are clean so that the food doesn’t cross contaminate.

“We saw there was a need of cleaning those bigger bins where right now they actually use pressure washers by hand,” he said.

Right now bin washers can clean 100 bins a day with three or four people. This new machine washes four bins every minute, significantly increasing the amount of bins washed per day.

Cabrera said it helps reduce the labor and the need to have more inventory of bins because you’re washing constantly.

“It’s all about innovation and keeping the cost down and keeping the humans safe,” he said.

Cabrera also mentioned that he believes Yuma is at the forefront of finding new innovative ways to keep people safe.

“Yuma’s on top of technology,” he said. “Yuma is on top of food safety for the whole world to eat our product so I think Yuma has a lot of good things to offer to the whole world and it’s a global thing,” he said.

For more stories on new technology in the agriculture industry visit this story here on new tractor technology.