G H Dean came to us with the remit of finding the best sprayer for modern, post and wire orchards which would give them the optimal spray coverage whilst allowing them to integrate with the precision spraying future/present. We pretended to look around for a good few seconds before landing on the one row airbag sprayer by Munckhof. This takes the airbag technology from the 3 row and shrinks it down to a convenient single row machine, retaining the optimal spray pattern we all know and love whilst being a smaller footprint.

Lukasz was the dream customer the whole way through, ensuring everything we spoke about was exactly what they wanted and needed from spray height to optional extras everything was carefully curated with the future in mind. Their sprayer is at the forefront of orchard technology and can feed in any prescription maps from those such as Aurea (link) to be able to reduce chemical use and human intervention by spraying exactly what’s needed, to only those trees that require it.
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G H Dean are an incredibly progressive, fast growing company which are committed to investing in the future and it give us great pride that they placed their trust in us to go forward together with them. Thanks to Lukasz and Tim as always and we look forward to co-operating again!

Mr Andrew Bridger, your Combisort is ready for collection. That’s Mr Bridger for a GREEFA Combisort.

Andy made the only logical decision and chopped his “perfect” (in name only) grader in and purchased a more perfecter GREEFA. No amount of nonsense English can describe how magnificent the machine is and it now stands proudly in West Kent ready to remain for a long time coming.

It’s a well-formed machine with only a dozen exits and onto packing tables; there’s beauty in simplicity. The Bridger family’s operation is as smooth as silk and every apple has a home for it, which is unusual in this day and age. Their connection to countless outlets has sheltered them from the supermarket storms and they continue to thrive in a tumultuous sea of sales.

The installation of the machine was a doddle and Max was a delight to tutor and quickly grasped the easy to read user interface, mastering the arts within the first week. We connected to the BURG to continue the budding relationship between the two and the line has run immaculately.
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As always, we’d like to extend our warmest thanks to Max and Andy for the trust they placed in us to deliver a world class machine for a world class business. There are few lovelier folks in the business and it was an absolute pleasure from start to finish. 

George Charltons & Sons have long been thought of as folks at the forefront of top fruit grading and packing and they’ve continued the long and storied collaboration with BURG with the purchase of new and shiny dedicated packing lines.

Charlton’s packhouse was a challenging one to fit everything required into, much like playing Tetris after a few shandies it wasn’t easy. However, thank the Lord for the sober brain of Joan van Burg who worked tirelessly to scale the differences in floor heights, peak round every corner and sneak past every pillar. The result was a wonderfully bespoke configuration giving Charlton’s every line they had wanted in the space provided.

They now have three flow wrapper lines, an existing Q-flow (Booooo) and two quicker and more efficient BFI lines. There is also a double speed bagger line for all the polybagging needs and a utility line of one side speed bagger, one side tray packing for ultimate flexibility, because as we all know those pesky but beloved supermarkets are always changing their minds.

Now as we know Charltons are not just UK fruit oriented but have a full scale import program on their hands and as such they need a better plan for potentially tipping imported boxes into all tanks. Would you believe it we have a solution for that! A single point of box tipping, elevated onto belting and dropped into the decided upon channel ready to be used on whichever line it may be. Magnificent.
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If you want us to navigate your maze and end at the holy grail, get in touch with us today. Until next time, fortune and glory, folks. 

The company is half way through its 48th year of trading and the big 5-0 is just around the corner. We couldn’t let the year pass by without some 50th birthday prep work.

We teamed up with Kylie at Rare Creative to cultivate something sleek and refreshing for the company. 
2020 as enabled us to step back a little and reassess our image. A lot of thought and time has gone into the new design and one we are particularly proud of. Our previous logo and image have been with us a long time and one we are widely known for. However, we felt it was time to bring a new light to the company that will take us forward as we grow.

F W Mansfields have purchased a wonderful new (to us and them) camera system that takes 1-3 high quality pictures of each bin of fruit, and automatically assigns them to bin on the grading system. This can be combined with a grade-out report to provide more clarity and transparency about the grading process to third party growers. There are often tensions that arise from the grading process, between grower's perceptions and grading reality, and this camera system looks to assuage those concerns with cold, hard picture evidence. This provides useful feedback for Mansfields customers that can only strengthen relationships going forward.

If you grade fruit for third party growers and are interested in this system, get in touch with us today to receive an information pack about the process and possibilities. 

Our workshop has recently taken in some spare parts that we have refurbished and are now ready to be sold. Head over to our new ‘For Sale’ Tab to see what is available.

Currently we are not taking online payments, however, if you are interested please call the office on 01227 765069.
Delivery charges apply.

This year the company has been reflecting on the 48 years of trading in the UK and not only have we said hello to wonderful new technologies but we’ve also said hard goodbyes.
 
The world’s first imported case unloader, which is truly unique, was trialed at F W Mansfield’s which has been a big step forward in the fruit industry. The machine takes the hardest element of unloading cases (the tipping) and makes it easy. Insert a box into it, it firstly removes the lid, turns the box and then gently unloads the fruit by removing the base. All excess cardboard is then brought to a single destination for easy compacting. This can be combined with a de-palletiser for truly a fully automated process,
 
Hard goodbye’s have come in many forms this year and has weighed heavy on our hearts. We’ve said goodbye to customers we class as friends and people who have worked with us from day one when Jan Vogelaar himself stood at the helm. Our condolences go out to all the customers, friends and their families who have been affected by 2020.
 
48 years of trading… multiple new sprayers have come and gone and come again, dozens of new graders and packing lines have been bought, upgraded and sold and hundreds of thousands of parts have been fitted. Some customers like shiny, new and state of the art and some are still running their 70s Universal graders. Whatever you are running, Kent Fruit Services will see it through until it’s end.
 
2021 is going to see new machines come and old machines go. Let’s hope it’s a better year than 2020.
 
For the company, the office remains open and our engineers will continue to support the industry for many more years to come.

Prime Produce continue their close affiliation with GREEFA, adding a new Combisort to their existing Geosort machine, they're now ready to deal with those pesky pears. Out goes the old, tired and aggressively red AWETA pear grader and in comes a shiny new green GREEFA, not by coincidence the colour of jealousy....

Tailor made to slot into their existing beautiful packhouse, this machine marries perfectly with a BURG POLSAP infeed to continue the trend of a seamless GREEFA/BURG relationship. This includes the assumption that conventional dryers will eventually be outlawed like the sponges on society that they are; the infeed to the grader now includes 2 air knives, blasting water off the apples in a soft yet forceful manner, and with no contamination worries.

Like most pear graders that aren't connected to water channels, the pears that are graded are packed straight from the machine, via multi purpose packing sets. The choice of both the grader itself and packing sets give Prime Produce a healthy dose of versatility both in the fruit they can grade but also the method of packing. This flexibility is paramount in an industry that has changing demands, both from year to year and intra-season.

The project was overseen by Gert Brouwer and Peter Kelly from start to finish and all thanks goes to them but most importantly to Richard Day and Sean Tennant of Prime Produce.

As another year draws to a close we're all a year older, and some of us a little wiser. It's been a fantastic year for us both commercially and personally, with lots of business being done and lots of relationships renewed. We would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of our customers for their trust, opportunities and kindness over the course of the year and very much look forward to more of the same in 2020. We are winding down now and taking a well deserved break; over the festive period we are out of the office from the 20th December until the 2nd of January.

​If you're interested in what we have been doing in 2019, scroll down and take a peek at a sample of our finest work, with much more planned for next year.

Finally, for those of us celebrating it, have an absolutely tremendous Christmas and an even better New Year and we will see you in perfectly clarity in 2020. 

I know what you're thinking, another article about Mansfields and BURG.....get a room, right!? Well they actually did, as you can see from the pictures and rather than get dirty in it, it actually gets clean. Inside each blue tank is a small snorkeled human feverishly picking out each individual dirt particle at a rate of 30,000 litres an hour, and they seem to be doing a rather good job of it too. Unfortunately health and safety doesn't allow this practice anymore so what actually happens is the water filters through layers of sand, glass and activated carbon which take out the particulates and the clean water is whisked away to the next stage of purification under UV lights, in order to eliminate the bacteria. Throw some hydrogen peroxide into the mix and this creates crystal clear water with no nasty unseen surprises.

The rationale for requiring a filtration unit is wanting to reduce the regularity with which the water is changed in the channels, due to the sheer volume in them and the associated cost of doing so. The idea is that you keep the water in the channels for as long as possible whilst maintaining good water quality. 

As always, thanks to BURG (Joan van Burg) and F.W Mansfields (Lee Port and Kuldar Sorra) and of course our glorious leader Peter Kelly for all their hard work. Whilst we're at it, they rarely get the appreciation they deserve; thanks to BURG engineers Andries, Mark and Piet and KFS reprobates Matthew, Marcin and Mark for the actual installation.