Episode
Nigel Beach: 50 million mandarins a day: Inside a $150M sorting empire
- Published
- Mar 4, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4738
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Summary
50 million mandarins processed every single day. In this episode of 2 Commas, Nigel Beach shares the story behind Compac, the New Zealand engineering company that quietly became a global leader in automated fruit sorting. Nigel spent more than two decades inside the business, starting as a graduate software engineer and eventually becoming a shareholder as the company expanded across the US, Europe, and South America. What began as a small engineering firm grew into a global technology company processing millions of pieces of fruit every hour. We explore how machine vision transformed the fruit industry, the complexity of building hardware and software at industrial scale, and the strategic decisions that helped Compac grow from around $5M in revenue to $150M before its eventual sale. This is a founder journey shaped by engineering curiosity, relentless problem solving, and decades of incremental innovation in a surprisingly complex global industry.