Niagara College avoids breaking hearts
Machine invented to assist Grimo Nut Nursery
For two decades, Grimo Nut Nursery has been looking for a better way to crack open heart nuts without damaging them.
The nursery, which Linda Grimo manages in Niagara-on-the-Lake, has sold the popular nuts for many years, but has had a hard time with inventory because of how the nuts had to be broken open.
The careful work of a brick and hammer have, up until now, been the only way to open the heart-shaped nuts without damaging either the shell or the meat inside.
“(The heart nut) does have some very challenging properties, which is why it’s taken us 20 years to get to this point,” Grimo said.
Gord Maretzki, a mechanical engineer and the research lead with Niagara College’s research and innovation department at the Welland campus, described the nut as having an “aspect ratio,” meaning its sides aren’t all the same and thus the nuts can’t be cracked the same way as others.
He said he and students have built a machine that can sense the asymmetrical qualities of the nut.
A prototype was demonstrated Thursday. All that’s left is fine-tuning and speeding up the machine, said Maretzki.
Grimo said having this machine will be vital to the business. It will allow her and other heartnut farmers to sell more product.
She said other nuts she sells at the nursery go for $12 a pound, but the heart nut has so far had a price tag of $25 a pound because of the labour involved. The machine will help bring down the price and increase the amount of product available.
She said she had no idea of Niagara College’s capabilities and resources for a project like this, but now seeing the end results, she’s really impressed. Other post-secondary institutions were unsuccessful in providing her with this kind of machine.
She’s also impressed with the fact her request wasn’t simply treated as another project.
“They didn’t just look at this as Linda’s little project bubble,” she said. “They looked at ‘how can we help this business develop this outside once we’re done with it?’”
After 20 years of searching for an answer, seeing the team take the project on in November and already have a functioning prototype amazes her.
The project was funded by part of a grant given to the Walker Advanced Manufacturing and Innovation Centre by the federal government in December.