How Mandarins are Harvested & Packed at Cuties Citrus in California

This video demonstrates how Cuties (mandarins) are harvested and packed in California.

This video was taken at the Cuties packing house in Maricopa, California. Cuties are harvested in the field with specifically designed clippers, and transported to the packing house, where they are washed, waxed, dried, hand sorted, go through two black light rooms, are machine sorted by size and quality, and are packed and palletized until shipment.

Please check out https://www.theproducenerd.com/2016/1... for more information related to the harvesting and packing of Cuties.

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Video Chapters:
0:00 Overview
0:10 What type of fruit is a Cutie?
0:24 Harvesting Cuties with clippers and harvesting bags
0:37 Dumping harvested product into bins and doing a quality control check
0:50 Ethylene degreening room for citrus
1:00 Bin dump and initial rinse
1:10 Black (UV) light room to detect green and blue mold
1:25 Single-pass wash step with sanitized water, are partially dried
1:36 Waxing step with a fungicide wax and another drying step
1:50 Hand sorting and another black light room (UV light room)
2:00 Optical sorting machine that sizes fruit and sorts by color
2:15 Labeling machine and then the Cuties are sent to the packing line specific to their size
2:28 Final hand sort
2:38 Automated packing into the red bags with blue labels
2:49 Box formation
3:00 Packing bagged product into boxes and stacking them to form pallets
3:37 Pallets are shrink wrapped and placed into storage
3:47 Filling pallets onto trucks for shipment

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