The COMPASS® Belt-Fed Optical Sorter is a food processing machine manufactured by Key Technology, part of Duravant’s Food Sorting and Handling Group. It is designed to inspect and sort wet, sticky, and delicate food products, including produce and snack foods, removing foreign materials and defects while maintaining product quality and yield.
This model is the belt-fed version of the COMPASS optical sorter line, first introduced in 2023 with a chute-fed model. The belt-fed configuration handles products horizontally, reducing product breakage, minimizing facility modifications, and lowering installation costs compared to chute-fed systems.
Key technical features include:
- NEXT sort engine for detecting and rejecting plastics, glass, paper, wood, and other organic and inorganic contaminants, as well as processor-specified defects.
- Customizable camera options with up to eight channels of multispectral sensor data for analyzing color, size, shape, and structure.
- Intelligent belt control for automatic belt tracking without manual adjustment.
- Recipe-driven operation allowing new recipes in under 10 minutes and changeovers in under a minute; full washdown changeovers in about 15 minutes.
- Sanitary open design with sloped surfaces, minimal moving parts, and removable belts for cleaning.
- Key Discovery™ software for collecting and analyzing product quality and sorting process data.
The COMPASS Belt-Fed Optical Sorter is available in multiple sizes and configurations to meet different application and capacity needs. It can be installed at various points in a processing line, from raw receiving to final inspection before packaging.
