Chances are you’ve seen this tomato-sorting machine before. Video footage of it goes viral on a semi-regular basis, as with this clip above, tweeted by @MachinePix this week. As mechanical contraptions go, it’s impressively fast and unnervingly precise. It’s sorting tomatoes, but it looks like the fingers of God flicked damned souls straight into hell.
It is also, according to Jim Frost, product manager at Tomra, the company that makes the thing, old hat. “We’ve been selling these machines for 25 years now,” he tells The Verge in a phone interview. “This particular sorter is sort of the mother of all sorters. It’s quite basic, and gets used out in the field.”
Tomra (and lots of other companies) sell sorters like this around the world...
