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 artichoke during transportation.
We have a state of the art custom built packing plant for artichokes. It consists of the following stages:
All this has to be done within 1 hour from the picking time. The following are the details of the main steps of packing:
This stage is done on special conveyors for inspection of the fruit quality. Lower grade fruits are sorted out and go to our processing plant.
The size of the artichoke is defined by the diameter. The weight of the fruit is function of the diameter. There are 3 main sizes:
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:
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.