Fresh produce company Meade Farm Group has completed a €1.7 million investment in its carrot production facility.

The Co. Meath business has been growing, packing and distributing premium quality potatoes, fruit, vegetables, salads and organics over the past five decades.

In order to meet demand for its carrots, the company has just increased its throughput by over a third.

The increased capacity has been achieved by UK-based Haith Group, which designed and installed a state-of-the art carrot grading and washing line at Meade’s facility in Lobinstown.

Taking six months to deliver, Haith’s full stainless steel line features two optical sorters, washing, de-stoning and polishing machinery.

The new facility is capable of handling 12 tonnes of carrot per hour.

The carrots enter the production line from tipping trailers in to a receiving hopper, before passing through a pre-soak immersion tank which includes a de-stoner to remove heavy clay soil.

The vegetables are then washed and polished before being cooled.

Finally, the carrots are sorted by size and quality and enter one of seven channels.

Commenting on the installation, Duane Hill, managing director of Haith Group said:

“Meade Farm has been a valued customer for several years, and as they’ve grown, they’ve asked us to design and install increasingly sophisticated packing lines for them.

“Meade prides itself on delivering quality produce to its customers, and our vegetable handling machinery plays a key part in this.”

Philip Meade snr started selling potatoes in 1977, with the Meade Potato Company being incorporated five years later.

In the years that followed, Meade’s passion for potatoes extended to Irish vegetables, including carrots and onions. The company changed its name to Meade Farm Group in 2020 to reflect the broad range of produce it supplies.

Robert Devlin, executive director for Meade Farm Group, said that similar to Haith Group, innovation is a core value for the company.

“We believe that if you are going to be sustainable, you have to be innovative.

“This philosophy saw us become the first company to export Irish potatoes by boat in 1996, bring back washed potatoes in the late 1980s and repeatedly invest in our facilities and gain the benefits of using the latest in vegetable handling machinery,” Devlin said.