Customer case
Fruit storage at Betko: Control from peak harvest to global delivery
From the orchards of the Cape to store shelves across 40 countries, the South African packhouse Betko has built a business on freshness, timing and reliability. With GEA’s controlled atmosphere refrigeration technology, the company can now store apples and pears for up to 14 months and cut peak power consumption by 20%, with a partnership of more than 30 years at the heart of it all.
Where mountains meet orchards
The Western Cape is one of the world’s great fruit-growing regions. Jagged mountain ranges catch the clouds; fertile valleys below them stretch out in orchards and vineyards as far as the eye can see. This is where Betko grows, packs and ships roughly 65,000 tons of apples and pears every year, supplying markets across Africa, Asia, Europe and the UK.
The business started modestly. Roux Groenewald’s late father bought surplus fruit from neighboring packhouses and sold it from a roadside stall. In the mid-1990s, the family started to plant its own orchards. Three decades later, Betko farms 1,000 hectares, exports to around 40 countries, and handles sixteen apple varieties and eight pear varieties. Growth on that scale brings opportunity but also complexity. Export markets stretch seasons, harvest volumes have increased and much of the fruit arrives at the packhouse within a short harvest window, long before it can be shipped.
For Betko, freshness is not just harvested in the orchard; it has to be preserved long after. “Without cold storage, we do not have a business,” says Roux Groenewald, Managing Director of Betko. “We need cold storage through the year to have this business.”
What follows is a story about cold, precision and trust. As volumes increased and markets expanded Betko needed a new controlled atmosphere (CA) facility that could push fruit storage by several months. This needed to be achieved against the limitations of the local electricity grid, one that is already under strain. And it needed a partner who understood not just the engineering, but the business it was protecting. GEA has been that partner since 1992.
A new facility, a hard constraint
Betko’s expansion project began in late 2023. Production was growing and the existing site had run out of both land and power. The solution was to build a new, standalone facility at a farm the company had acquired in Sunnyside, closer to the orchards, where some grid capacity was available.
“The starting point of this project was energy optimization,” explains Shaun Kleb, Head of Project Sales Southern and Eastern Africa, Heating and Refrigeration Solutions, GEA. “We had to go and look at every aspect of where we could save power. Think outside the box, challenge the status quo. The facility was designed for 24 CA stores, 1,200 bins per store, and we could stack the bins 11 high instead of the industry standard of 10. For the same 5,000 square meter footprint, the customer simply gets more in.”
As the design evolved and more power became available, the facility was built with infrastructure already sized for a second phase of another 24 stores, allowing Betko to process approximately 50,000 additional bins of fruit per year. In its first season, more than 37,000 bins went through it, already exceeding the original design capacity.
Pushed to the limit: fourteen months
Alan Salonika has managed Betko’s refrigeration operations for more than 30 years and still advises the team as a technical expert. He knows better what the storage challenge means in practice: “In the past, we were looking at six to seven months of average storage. That put us in a situation of forced sales because of the lack of cold storage space.”
“With this new project, we’re pushing our storage toward twelve, even fourteen months, which allows for more flexibility in our distribution worldwide.”
Alan Salonika
Refrigeration Advisor, Betko
Engineering that starts with the floor
“The brief from Betko was not only to extend the storage time,” Shaun adds, “but also to do it in the most energy-efficient way and make it easier for them to manage.” Achieving that goal required GEA to look at the whole building, not just the machinery inside it.
“Each of our design choices served the same goal: giving Betko more time, more control and more certainty over its fruit.”
Shaun Kleb
Head of Project Sales Southern and Eastern Africa, Heating and Refrigeration Solutions, GEA
One of the first decisions was to insulate the floor, standard practice for freezer facilities but rarely applied in CA stores. “With any temperature gradient between inside and outside, there is a transmission load, and that is a refrigeration load we need to take care of,” Shaun notes. “We did some high-level calculations, and the payback was within a year. That was a no-brainer. We’re probably going to roll that out at other similar CA facilities.”
When the obvious answer is the wrong one
Air management inside the rooms required equally careful thought. Variable frequency drives on the evaporator fans seemed like an obvious efficiency measure. However, experience at a previous Betko site told a different story. “At the previous site, they did install variable speed fans. The results were not satisfying,” Shaun recalls. “If the air velocity and air volumes in a CA store are not right, you get hotspots and wilting. Imagine 1,200 bins in a room after 14 months, and then you find damage to the fruit. That is not a gamble we were going to take. Instead, the entire blower coil had to be optimized. This is the most critical design element as it allows optimization of evaporation temperature (affecting compressor power) while balancing this against fan volumes and air pressure drop. Small changes all make a difference, for example, we fitted a cowling on the fan inlet, a proven technique that delivers a 2 to 3% saving in absorbed fan power and designed the cooler shallower than standard to cut the pressure drop through the coil.”
Compressors built for a constrained grid
At the heart of the system sit three GEA Grasso V series reciprocating compressors, with a fourth identical unit in standby. The choice of three matching machines with a common spare keeps maintenance simple and running hours even across the plant.
“We opted for the GEA V series reciprocating compressor because of its low maintenance and high efficiency,” Shaun continues. “The compressors run with variable frequency drives, controlling the speed between 500 and 1,500 RPM. When the load tapers off in winter, we run them slower and the coefficient of performance improves. That is where the efficiency really comes in.”
The variable frequency drives also allow a smooth ramp-up rather than a hard start, avoiding the power spikes that would strain a constrained grid. This, together with high pressure liquid subcooling resulted in a 20% reduction in peak power consumption compared to a conventional designs.
“That 20% reduction in peak power really means that the customer can expand by another 20% in production without needing more power from the local grid.”
Hannes Steyn
Senior Director Country Manager Southern and Eastern Africa, GEA
Every 60 seconds: control that never sleeps
Sitting above the hardware is the layer that ties everything together: GEA’s Adaptive Suction Set Point Control. The system collects data from every individual room, analyzes it in real time, and recalculates the optimal operating point every 60 seconds. “The system is continuously adjusted to make sure that it only uses the absolute minimum energy required to do the job,” explains Hannes.
The data flows to the GEA cloud, giving Betko’s refrigeration manager, Albertus Hanekom, remote visibility and control across all 24 rooms divided over the two sites: “I’m able to log in via my phone and look into any of the rooms and make changes as I want. Each room stores different varieties and has its own oxygen and CO₂ setpoints. We also use dynamic controlled atmosphere, where we set the O₂ setpoint lower in order to store fruit longer. Sensors make sure that the fruit does not stress.”
More than technology
The technology is only part of the story. CA storage at this level of precision requires operational expertise that no control system can fully replace: which varieties can be stored together, how to precool fruit across multiple rooms before consolidating to avoid overloading a single store, when to follow the industry guideline and when to deviate. That side of the management of CA fruit comes with experience.
It is the same approach that GEA brings from its side. “As a multinational, GEA has global experience and best practice from all around the world,” says Hannes. “But we match it through our local organizations. If we work with a company in the apple business, we can speak apples. Every customer is unique. They have unique needs, unique demands, unique challenges. We really try to understand that and optimize the design so that the customer gets the greatest value out of their facility.”
An unwritten partnership
When Betko started planning this expansion, choosing to work with GEA was not a decision that required much deliberation. “We’ve been doing business with GEA for more than 30 years,” says Roux.
“The emphasis should really be on continuous business instead of just business. It’s not really a business relationship, it’s more an unwritten partnership. We gave them carte blanche in terms of energy optimization because we trusted Shaun and his team to optimize the design.”
Roux Groenewald
Managing Director, Betko
Genuine trust
For GEA, the Betko project shows what is possible when a long relationship translates into genuine trust. They approached the entire design differently from industry practice, drawing on hard experience from the previous Betko site. They built a facility that outperformed its designed capacity in the very first season.
Ask Roux about the future and he is characteristically direct: “We have the infrastructure to double the current capacity. In business, you have to be cautiously optimistic, with the emphasis on optimistic.” For a company that started selling fruit by the roadside and now ships to 40 countries, that is not a bad motto to work by.
GEA scope of supply
Cooling capacity: 2.4 MW
Compressors: 3 x GEA Grasso V series reciprocating compressors
Storage temperature: -0.5°C to 1.5°C (variety-dependent)
Refrigerant: Ammonia (natural refrigerant, GWP = 0)
Control system: GEA Omni System - Adaptive Suction Set Point Control
Monitoring: Remote access and control via GEA cloud and mobile
EER: 4.45 and 6.48 during long-term storage conditions
