July 2019 - 14

COLD STORAGE
Storage Control's SafePod manages CA performance
By Gary Pullano
Managing Editor
Monitoring the heartbeat of an apple is
big business.
Jim Schaefer, president of Storage
Control Systems (SCS) in Sparta,
Michigan, said respiration rates are the
latest technology in understanding the
controlled atmosphere (CA) benefits and
ranking of CA rooms.
" Respiration rate is a tool of the
marketing, " Schaefer said. " Probably the
biggest breakthrough in the last few years
is looking at the respiration of the fruit in
the CA room and being able to rank rooms
(for that purpose). (It's) in conventional as
well as organic, but organic was the driving
force behind the need for low oxygen, but
along with low-oxygen, using the SafePod
you get the extra value of respiration data. "
SCS's patented SafePod system creates
a chamber composed of representative
samples of fruit inside large CA storage,
allowing the operator to test for the optimal
storage regime of the optimal produce
to be stored without the potential risk of
damaging the entire CA store.
" It just looks at the current atmosphere
and what the apples can survive down to,
and making sure the fruit is breathing in
and out at the right rate, " Schaefer said. " We
can see the heartbeat of the apple. "
the silver bullet for that and seems to be the
latest thing for the fruit grower. We have a
per-bin price - or max - that the grower is
really getting used to because everybody
thinks (initially), 'I don't want to lease it, I
want to own it.' Well, do you? It's a scientific
instrument. We'll clean it, we'll calibrate it,
we'll watch it. We're going to babysit you
every week of every month in CA and we
coach you along the way. "
Storage Control has developed a website
for SafePod, which is uploading data
Jim Schaefer with the SafePod storage system.
" Anybody in CA has to be looking at
low oxygen, " Schaefer said. " It's additive
to SmartFresh (postharvest treatment
from AgroFresh) - I don't want to say it's a
replacement, but if we had understood low
oxygen before SmartFresh, it could have
been interesting. "
" SmartFresh has its place, and maybe
it's a Band-Aid for someone who doesn't
have good cooling, but when you have a
good storage that can get apples as cold as
necessary per variety and per conditioning,
and drop the temperature back to where
we used to in the (late) David Dilley days
- (one of the world's leading scientists in
the investigation of the biological processes
taking place in fruits and vegetables
following harvest) he was off the tree,
cold and into CA in five to seven days. If
we go back to that, maybe we get rid of
some Gala problems because everybody
has shoulder browning and issues with
their Galas. Did we have that back then? I
don't think so, but maybe there's different
strains and different growing techniques. "
Low-oxygen approach
Schaefer said he has a lot of customers
who this year are going to concentrate a
lot more on low oxygen, using SafePods
and " trying to get away from some of those
issues, so we'll see how it goes. Safe Pod is
hourly, and bringing it up to the cloud,
" and then through the website you can
interact and look at all of your data. You
can rank your rooms, or rank other rooms
in the region, or in the U.K., or in Yakima
or Wenatchee, Washington, or in South
America or France, " Schaefer said.
" People grow Gala around the world. If
you can look at respiration and say, 'Look
at this, I have the lowest respiring Gala in
the world. I think I'm going to keep this
room a little longer.' You don't want to
open that room, because it's your longterm
room. SafePod gives you a global
presence, and it's exciting. "
" We're in the age of data, and at Storage
Control we're taking that to our customers
in a way that is different than anyone else
in the world is doing it, " said Bryan Cook,
See SAFEPOD, page 16
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14 | FruitGrowersNews.com
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July 2019

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