# Manufacturing and processing - using IoT to improve the processing of food
Once food reaches a central hub or processing plant, it isn't always just shipped out to supermarkets. A lot of the time the food goes through a number of processing steps, such as sorting by quality. This is a process that used to be manual - it would start in the field when pickers would only pick ripe fruit, then at the factory the fruit would be ride a conveyer belt and employees would manually remove any bruised or rotten fruit. Having picked and sorted strawberries myself as a summer job during school, I can testify that this isn't a fun job.
Once food reaches a central hub or processing plant, it isn't always just shipped out to supermarkets. A lot of the time the food goes through a number of processing steps, such as sorting by quality. This is a process that used to be manual - it would start in the field when pickers would only pick ripe fruit, then at the factory the fruit would ride a conveyer belt and employees would manually remove any bruised or rotten fruit. Having picked and sorted strawberries myself as a summer job during school, I can testify that this isn't a fun job.
More modern setups rely on IoT for sorting. Some of the earliest devices like the sorters from [Weco](https://wecotek.com) use optical sensors to detect the quality of produce, rejecting green tomatoes for example. These can be deployed in harvesters on the farm itself, or in processing plants.