Bright Idea: A Better Apple Picker

Owners of fruit orchards have faced the same challenges for hundreds of years: how to pick fruit quickly and safely, protect it from bruising and get it to market expeditiously. Whooshh Innovations of Bellevue has developed a new harvesting and transport system called PickerTech that helps address many of those challenges.

The PickerTech mobile harvest system allows workers to stand on platforms instead of ladders while picking fruit such as apples and pears. The picker drops the fruit into a tube attached to the platform. The tube contains a series of baffles that conform to the fruit, allowing for a patented, pneumatic process that creates a pressure differential to pull the fruit quickly and gently to its destination.

A scanner identifies blemished fruit and puts it in a special bin for processing into apple juice and other processed products. The quality fruit goes into a separate bin that is either sent to refrigerated storehouses or to a packing plant to ready it for market. The cost of a new harvester can approach $200,000 or more, depending on components requested, but Vincent Bryan III, CEO of Whooshh Innovations, says the savings in picking, transportation, packaging and storage could result in a quick return on investment for any client.

Whooshh Innovations, founded in 2007 as PickerTech, is starting with agriculture, but could find its largest markets in industrial applications. The company already has a joint-venture partner in Norway, as well as with government agencies in the United States, looking at applications for the salmon aquaculture industry. Whooshhs tubes may be used to transport live salmon from the ponds to processing plants. The tubes may also replace conveyor belts and carts to transport salmon from one end of a processing plant to the other. Elizabeth Sandoval