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Equipment

Bulk bins, crates and pallets

What is fruit stored and moved in before it reaches the mill?

In short

The unit of cider fruit handling is now the bulk bin: a ventilated timber or plastic box on an integral pallet base, taking around half a tonne to a tonne, lifted by fork from any side.

Before that it was the sack and the cart, and both survive at small scale alongside stacking crates for hand-picked fruit and net sacks for a few kilograms.

What the container does is set the depth. Fruit at the bottom of a deep bin carries the weight of everything above it, and soft or sweated fruit in a deep bin crushes itself before it ever reaches the mill.

Sacks, crates and bins

The traditional West Country unit was the sack, filled in the orchard and carted, and it persists at small scale because it is cheap and a person can move one. Its drawbacks are the ones a sack always has: fruit is compressed against fruit, air does not move through it, and a wet sack of windfalls left for a week is a bag of rot.

Stacking crates — vented plastic boxes of twenty or thirty kilograms — are the fruit trade’s answer for anything picked by hand, and they are a good answer for cider fruit too where the volumes allow. Shallow depth means no crushing, the ventilation is real, and the crates stack and wash. What they do not do is move a tonne of fruit efficiently.

The bulk bin is what the industry runs on: a box roughly a cubic metre in volume with slatted or perforated sides and a pallet base, made in timber or in moulded plastic, designed to be lifted by a forklift or a telehandler and tipped mechanically. Timber bins are cheaper and heavier; plastic bins cost more, weigh less, wash properly and last. Because both are handled by machine, everything downstream — the tipper, the hopper, the store layout — is designed around the bin dimension.

Storing fruit before milling

A bin is where fruit waits, and how long it can wait depends on the fruit and on the store. Many cider varieties are deliberately held after picking to soften and to allow starch to convert — sweating, in the traditional vocabulary — and a ventilated bin under cover is exactly the right place for that. An unventilated container is not: the fruit respires, generates heat and moisture, and the middle of a sealed mass goes anaerobic and then rotten.

Rain is the other enemy. An uncovered bin in an autumn downpour fills with water in the bottom layer, and that layer will be rotten within days while the top of the bin looks fine. Bins are stored under cover, or on a slight tilt, or at minimum inspected after rain.

Bins are also where a batch record begins. A bin labelled with the variety, the block and the date is the start of any traceability the operation is going to have, and it is the only chance to keep lots separate — once two bins have gone into the same hopper the distinction is gone permanently. Producers who want single-variety or single-block lots plan that at the bin, not at the press.

Tipping

Getting fruit out of a bin without damaging it is a small engineering problem with several answers. A bin tipper — a cradle that grips the bin and rotates it — is the standard machine, and the gentle versions tip slowly into water or onto a bed of fruit rather than dropping the load. A telehandler with a rotating attachment does the same job with less precision. At farm scale a ramp, a bin on its side and a pair of hands still works.

The gentlest tip of all is into a flotation tank, because the fruit lands in water and the water cushions it while also beginning the wash. That combination is the reason most modern intakes put the tip point over the tank rather than over a dry hopper.

The worst case is a bin dropped from height onto a steel plate, which bruises the whole load at once and splits a proportion of it. Where a dry tip is unavoidable, the drop is kept short and the landing surface is something that gives.

Materials, hygiene and the season before

Mechanical handling

A full bulk bin is a heavy load — several hundred kilograms and often more — carried at height on a machine, and stacked bins are a load on a load. Forklift and telehandler operation is a trained and, in most jurisdictions, formally certificated activity, and the training exists because these machines kill people regularly. Nobody works, walks or stands under a raised bin, between a tipper and a wall, or in the path of a reversing machine. Bins are stacked only to the height they are rated for and only on level ground, and a damaged bin is taken out of the stack rather than put at the bottom of it.

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