Sorma Group

Sorma Group is an Italian maker of post-harvest processing and packaging machinery for fresh fruit and vegetables, based in Cesena in the Romagna region. Nevio Lotti founded it in 1973, after gaining business experience in Spain with the engineering firm Roda. The group celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. Its holding company is MNLG S.R.L. (Sorma Group Holding, VAT IT03247540408), and its main operating company in Cesena is Sorma S.p.A. Sorma S.p.A. is registered as a maker of automatic dosing, packing and wrapping machines and had 118 employees and EUR 41.6 million in revenue in 2024.

Sorma designs and builds complete automated lines for post-harvest handling. Each line can cover infeed from bins, boxes, big bags or water channels; pre-sorting; treatment; optical sorting; packaging; palletising and strapping; and pack-to-pallet traceability. The company describes itself as able to supply a turnkey solution covering the whole line of machines. It reports more than 160 automatic machine models, around 60 packaging formats protected by about 60 industrial patents, and an in-house engineering team of 35.

Its Sormatech optical sorters grade produce by internal and external quality, colour, shape, diameter, density and weight, imaging the whole fruit surface. Each sorting line has a dedicated industrial PC that processes more than 3.7 GB of data in real time. It manages nine cameras that take 108 images per fruit at 15 fruits per second. The sorters handle kiwifruit, peaches, nectarines, apricots, tomatoes, citrus, potatoes, onions, peppers and carrots.

Packaging machinery includes weighers such as the WD4-S, the CBR-170 packer for Vertbag stand-up packs, the Aporo packing machine, and tray-filling and labelling equipment. The CP810 VW5 combination weigher, launched in early 2023 for cluster tomatoes and grape bunches, lets operators fill trays by hand while the machine finds the best fruit combination to reach a guaranteed minimum weight.

At Fruit Logistica 2024 in Berlin, Sorma launched a box-filling robot developed at its German facility. Its articulated hand picks up each net pack and places it in the box rather than dropping it, and an oscillation mechanism settles the pack in position to limit impact damage. The robot works with the whole Sorma range of net packaging and is presented as replacing one or two line operators.

Sorma also makes its own packaging materials, including printed items and nets. The Sormapaper line of recyclable, FSC-certified paper packs includes the plastic-free Sormapaper Vertbag, cellulose meshes and netted paper punnets.

The group's companies are Sorma S.p.A. and Netpack Italia in Cesena; Sormaf in Cavaillon, France; Sorma Iberica in Valencia, Spain; Sorma Deutschland in Altenstadt, Germany; Sorma Benelux in 's-Gravenzande, the Netherlands; Sorma Amros and Filepack near Izmir, Turkey; Sormaf Maroc in Ait Melloul, Morocco; Sorma USA in Visalia, California (founded in 2012); Sorma Interamericana in Limeira, Brazil; and companies in Calera de Tango, Chile, and Lima, Peru. Around 40 specialist distributors serve other markets.