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About one-quarter of Accu-Label’s sales are in Canada, with the rest in the United States and Mexico, says Joe Sleiman, who is president of Accu-Label Inc. and Ag-Tronic Control Systems Inc.Terri Michienzi

Growing up in Leamington in Southwestern Ontario, known as the tomato capital of Canada, Joe Sleiman saw the need for technology that could improve how fruits and vegetables are grown, harvested, packaged and sold.

The son of a labourer who worked for the H.J. Heinz Co. after the family immigrated from Lebanon in 1963, he was also aware of the lack of resources to pay for improvements in seasonal, low-margin farms, such as the ones that supplied the ketchup giant.

When Mr. Sleiman got a degree as an electromechanical engineering technician from St. Clair College in Windsor, Ont., rather than join his fellow graduates who applied their skills to make sensors and control systems for the automotive industry, he was determined to adapt them to food and agriculture.

"They really needed automation in a desperate way," recalls Mr. Sleiman, 57, president of Accu-Label Inc. and Ag-Tronic Control Systems Inc.

Accu-Label sells tiny, paper-based product look-up, or PLU, labels that are affixed to fruits and vegetables. Ag-Tronic makes the equipment that creates and applies them. The companies operate out of a plant just east of Windsor that has 26 employees and makes 1.5 billion labels each year.

About one-quarter of sales are in Canada, with the rest in the United States and Mexico. The companies are also expanding to other promising markets such as Holland, Australia and New Zealand, with a growing emphasis on food safety and traceability.

Mr. Sleiman started out in 1987 servicing electronics on agricultural machinery, and he tinkered with modifications to farm equipment in the basement of the home he rented with his growing family. His early successes came in designing a height-control system for field tomato harvesters so that the cutting blades could be moved up or down, depending on the terrain, as well as a colour-sorting machine to group tomatoes of similar ripeness in the packing process.

The goal has always been to develop high-end automation at a rock-bottom cost.

"I'm approached with the most unique problems to solve but with the worst budgets," he says. "It's like saying you have to build the space shuttle for the price of a Volkswagen."

He started Ag-Tronic in 1991 and moved into machine vision systems in 1997, especially focusing on new products for greenhouses, which "catapulted us forward." There was a grader that measured the length, width and curvature of cucumbers being crated and a system to accurately label and pack beefsteak tomatoes of different sizes.

The next big problem to come along was "cluster" tomatoes, a product he'd been unaware of with four children ("we couldn't afford them"). They are vine-ripened tomatoes that are harvested while still attached to their stems in groupings. He heard from retailers "upset because the labels were stuck all over them."

Over two years he designed a special vision system that would apply labels within specific targets. He realized the system had "global potential."

Today his labels are fully biodegradable, unlike the industry-standard plastic, with edible adhesives that correspond in stickiness to the type of skin to which they need to adhere. They can be printed by packers on the fly and applied as needed.

Each label can include a range of data, including a code "that traces the fruit right back to the grower and the tree that it came from," which is important if there are quality concerns, for example.

"The response has been overwhelming," Mr. Sleiman says, especially in more lucrative European and Asian markets, where he is lining up distributors and looking for joint ventures and partnerships. He has plans to eventually incorporate in each of the markets, as he has already done in the United States, largely because foreign customers "like to have a local dealer, otherwise they have to worry about getting long-distance service."

He says that with such markets, "qualifying your representatives is something that takes time, research and sometimes trial-and-error." It's also important to focus on return on investment and therefore to find bigger markets; it's easy enough to look around in grocery stores, he says, and see the countries that are major exporters of fruits and vegetables that he should target.

His current list includes South Africa and Italy. Indeed, he notes that northern Italy produces five times the volume of apples as Washington state. He also expects that it has 10 times the labelling needs, given the greater awareness about food safety issues in Europe.

Ron Bonnett, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, says new technologies that make agricultural products traceable to their source are important.

"A lot of consumers are now asking a lot more questions about where their food is coming from; this way we know," says Mr. Bonnett, a cattle farmer, noting that robotics, sensors and other forms of automation are transforming the industry. "It's almost mind-boggling where we've gone in the last 10 or 15 years."

Markets such as Europe tend to be further ahead in terms of demands for quality controls, and it's good if Canadian innovations can meet them, says Mr. Bonnett, who expects that one day shoppers will be able to trace the origin of food items on store shelves using their phones to read labels.

Mr. Sleiman thinks his company has the potential to produce 50 billion labels a year worldwide.

Meanwhile, he's still tinkering with new automation systems; for example, he's working with his daughter Terri Michienzi, a mechanical engineer, on robotic food-safe packaging solutions.

"I see machines in my head," he adds. "We're doing this for the betterment of the industry."

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