The awards program showcases ground-breaking innovation across the agritech sector and recognizes the best companies, products and services in industry.
“With over 1,600 nominations for our third annual awards program, the competition was fierce,” noted Bryan Vaughan, Managing Director of Tech Breakthrough.
Established in 2016, Hectre has a global team of 46 and offers a rare product combination of orchard management modules plus mobile fruit sizing. Customers include the likes of international fruit leaders Washington Fruit & Produce, Borton Fruit, Rockit Global, First Fresh NZ and BC Tree Fruits, just to name a few.
This month, Hectre’s mobile fruit sizing AI app, Spectre, sized it’s 27 millionth piece of fruit. The technology is popular for its simplicity of use and fast reliable results. To use Spectre, orchard and packhouse staff simply take a photo of a full bin of fruit using an iPad, and within seconds they receive a size distribution graph detailing the size band estimations of the bin of fruit, delivering valuable data for improved decisions around storage, sales and packline planning.
Initially built for apple growers and packers, Spectre models for both citrus and cherries are now being used by industry.
The company runs dual-hemisphere R&D teams which has seen their speed to innovate become industry leading, delivering a competitive edge.
Spectre Top Down is one of Hectre’s newest products and has been developed in response to demand from high-volume fruit producers. Taking the simplicity and reliability of Spectre, a customized camera set up is connected to the app, enabling semi-automated bin capture for fruit detection and sizing.
Flatbed trucks pulling up at receiving sites pass under the camera and Spectre Top Down detects and sizes fruit straight off the top of the truck. Massive size samples of 4,000 plus apples are gained from one truck pass, providing significant data that sales, QC and packhouse managers can rely upon. Already, seven Washington receiving sites have implemented Spectre Top Down.
Having doubled their US market share in the past year, Hectre is forecasting significant growth across for the next 12-month period as uptake for their award-winning app continues.
