Netherlands: Ellips AI Pre-Sorter Removes Stones and Clods at up to 120 Tonnes per Hour

The CleanFlow Pre-Sorter from Dutch company Ellips, launched in September, targets one of the most labor-intensive chokepoints of the harvest chain: removing stones and soil clods before potatoes reach the grading line, at throughputs of up to 120 tonnes per hour.

The system uses Ellips’ True-AI image recognition to distinguish tubers from stones, clods, rotten and green tubers, lifting contaminants out one at a time while leaving potatoes untouched.

Removing stones early protects downstream equipment — graders, washers and optical sorters — from damage and reduces the manual picking crews that growers increasingly struggle to hire. According to Ellips, the machine can cut manual pre-sorting labour by up to 80%.

The machine is aimed at both on-farm reception hoppers and packhouse intake, and its throughput matches the capacity of modern two-row self-propelled harvesters feeding central storage.

European manufacturers have raced to add AI vision to harvest handling over the past three seasons; the differentiator now is robustness under dirt, dust and variable light — conditions in which earlier camera systems often lost accuracy.

Sources: PotatoPro, 2 Sep 2026; Ellips — CleanFlow Pre-Sorter