Agrograde installs automated onion grader at Pimpalgaon market
Agrograde’s GradePlus Pro system at a farmer producer company in Pimpalgaon, Nashik, can grade up to 10 tonnes of onions an hour, aiming to cut labour needs, reduce skin damage and improve consistency for domestic and export supply chains.
What happened
Agrograde installed its GradePlus Pro automated onion grader at a farmer producer company in Pimpalgaon, Nashik, targeting faster, lower-cost post-harvest
Key facts
- Up to 10 tonnes of onions per hour
- Nearly 80% reduction in grading labour
- Up to 99% grading accuracy
- Three to five times higher throughput than manual grading
- ₹0.05 per kg grading cost
- Up to 200 tonnes per day
- Founded in 2018
- More than 130 machines deployed
- 14 States
Why this matters
Produce aggregators, exporters and agri-tech platforms could view Agrograde as a partnership target to add standardized grading capacity and traceable quality assurance near major farm markets.
What to watch
- Verified grading accuracy and skin-damage reduction after peak harvest operation.
- Sustained throughput near 10 tonnes per hour rather than demonstration-level output.
- A measurable premium for machine-graded export or organised-retail lots versus mandi-average lots.
- Additional orders from Nashik, Maharashtra onion clusters or other producing states.
- Government export-policy changes, onion stock limits or export restrictions that weaken the value of export-grade sorting.
- Labour shortages during harvest that increase the return on automation.
- Machine maintenance costs, operator skill requirements or downtime complaints.
- Track Agrograde's disclosed installation base, uptime, seasonal utilisation and repeat orders from FPOs or packhouses.
- Monitor whether the Pimpalgaon operator secures export-packhouse, modern retail or institutional supply contracts using machine-graded lots.
- Watch for financing, subsidy or state horticulture support for post-harvest automation that lowers upfront adoption barriers.
- Assess whether competing optical sorters, weighing systems and digital lot-traceability vendors bundle into end-to-end onion packhouse offerings.
- Monitor changes in grade-wise price realisation, rejection rates, storage losses and labour deployment at the installation.