BEST Xray Project

We were at the BEST factory in Belgium all day today. They make several types of sorting equipment and it is pretty interesting how well they can identify different things and sort them. They can sort recyclable garbage, seperate snakes and rats from lettuce, and for some time have been working with laser sorting to seperate foreign material and aflatoxin from peanuts.

More recently, they have started working with an industry committee on grading to develop paramaters which would allow an x-ray machine they manufacture to be used to grade peanuts.

These guys are good at what they can do if we can ever decide as an industry what it is we want to sample for.

I really dreaded this trip but I certainly am happy now I made it because there has been some very serious and good discussion spawned by our visit to BEST.

Here Bjorn Tumas of Belgium Electornic Sorting Technologies (BEST) explains a laser sorter to Randall Taylor with Georgia FSIS, Jack Chastain of Doster Warehouse, and Joe Boddiford of the Georgia Peanut Commission.