The tea color sorter is a key equipment in the modern tea processing process, which plays an indispensable role in refining tea and achieving large-scale and standardized production.
1. Improve the quality of tea leaves
a. Fresh leaf sorting: After picking fresh leaves, the fresh tea leaf sorting machine can accurately grade single buds, one bud and one leaf, one bud and two leaves, old leaves, impurities, etc. in fresh leaves, solving the problems of difficulty in grading fresh leaves and uneven withering, reducing the breakage rate of dry tea, ensuring the consistency of tea appearance and taste, and providing standardized raw materials for subsequent processing.
b. Stem sorting: In the processing stage of raw tea, the color sorting machine uses high-resolution cameras and AI big data analysis to efficiently distinguish stems, stems, and leaves in tea leaves, achieving no stems in the stems and no stems in the tea leaves.
c. Shape selection grading: The color difference between tender buds and old leaves in tea can be graded based on the tenderness of shape selection, meeting the appearance requirements of high-end markets for “special grade” and “first grade” tea. At the same time, different tea leaves can be sorted by size, length, and thickness to maintain consistency and increase premium space.
2.Improve production efficiency
a. Replacing manual picking with a single color sorter: Traditional manual picking processes about 10-30 kilograms of tea per person per day, while a color sorter can process over 1200 kilograms per hour, increasing efficiency by more than 50 times and reducing labor costs by 70% -90%. After using color sorting machines, some companies have accurately removed defective products, increasing the yield rate of tea products from 82% to over 98%, saving over one million yuan in raw material costs annually.
b. Intelligent production lines enhance tea making efficiency: The emergence of intelligent production lines enables standardized tea making and sorting processes, greatly driving the improvement of tea making efficiency. Taking Yunlian Tea Industry in Yunlian County, Sichuan Province as an example, it produces 40 tons of dry tea per day, which has driven nearly 10000 tea farmers in the surrounding areas to increase their income and become prosperous.
3. Ensuring food safety
a. Foreign object prevention and control: The safety standards for tea exports are becoming increasingly stringent, and higher requirements have been put forward for the control rate of foreign impurities during the processing. Jiexun color selection technology can detect tiny impurities of 0.5 millimeters or more, including metals, plastics, hair, insect eggs, etc., avoiding the risk of complaints and returns caused by excessive foreign matter content in tea due to EU regulations such as EC1881/2006.
b. Mold detection: Identifying moldy tea leaves through near-infrared spectroscopy to reduce the risk of aflatoxins and meet the preventive control requirements of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).
4. Enhance the added value of tea
a. In the production of flower tea, after the fragrance is extracted from the flowers, color selection technology is used to remove the flowers and retain the tea, which can effectively improve the utilization rate of fresh flowers and the flavor quality of tea leaves.
b. In the production of matcha, color selection technology is used to separate dark green and light green tea leaves, and grade matcha to ensure color consistency.
c. In the production of white tea, color selection technology can effectively distinguish silver hairs from leaves, facilitating product grading and subsequent blending.