Description
• Early crop in November is only available from our packing plant.
• Within 1 hour from picking time, the artichokes are transported, sorted, sized, packed on our packing line, and put in our pre-cooling facilities.
• Our fresh artichokes for export are characterized by their freshness, long shelf life, and highest quality.
– Packing artichokes for export
Picking artichokes:
The fully grown artichoke plant is about 120 cm high with lot of big leaves of about 100 cm long each. One plant could carry up to 5 fruits with different sizes at the same time. When a fruit is picked, more will come. Depending on the packing orders, the fruit with adequate size are picked.
Smaller fruits are left on the plant to be picked later when they reach the desired size. The artichokes are carefully picked from the farms with long stems along with some fresh plant leaves. This insures the freshness of the artichokes during transportation.
Packing plant:
We have a state of the art custom built packing plant for artichokes.
It consists of the following stages:
• Cutting stems
• Sorting
• Sizing
• Packing
• Palletizing
• Pre-cooling
• Refrigerated storage.
All this has to be done within 1 hour from the picking time. The following are the details of the main steps of packing:
Packing:
Airfreight packing: In carton boxes
Seafreight packing: Well aerated wooden boxes. Pallets carry 100 boxes.The pack is carrying different number of fruits according to the size as follows:
• Size 1: 30 fruits
• Size 2: 24 fruits
• Size 3: 20 fruits
Shipment:
The container is loaded at the end of the same packing day. Artichoke pallets after being pre-cooled and kept in the store along the day, are stuffed 20 pallets per container.
We synchronize the picking, packing, land transport and port work to be less than 6 hours from the sailing time of the vessel.
