Valley Growers: Enhancing Productivity through Automation

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Sudbury, Ontario is a place renowned for pulling minerals out of the ground, but Valley Growers is doing its best to put anotherunderground resource, potatoes, on the map. Dating back to the 19th century, Sam Rainville discovered that potatoes grown inthe rich, sandy soil north of Sudbury produced some of the most exceptional potatoes hed ever eaten. Since then, potatoes havebecome a staple crop in Sudbury, and Valley Growers has become one of the communitys premier potato farms. In addition toharvesting potatoes, Valley Growers also produces its own French fries. Currently, they produce over 3,000 cases of fries perweek, and the annual sales associated to this tasty, golden product is more than $3-million.The challenge confronting Valley Growers is that they do not have an automated and intuitive system for gauging how effectivetheir cooling methods are after the deep frying process. As a result, Cambrian College is proposing the installation of infraredtemperature monitors across the production line in order to assess what the temperature is of the fries as they immediately comeout of the fryer and the cooling units. Currently, the temperature of the French Fries is taken manually using remote probesensors, which slows down the production cycle and limits efficiency. Using automated sensors, data will be captured into acomputer where Valley Growers can then carefully monitor the temperature of the French fries in real time in order to enhanceproduction.