Tong appoints new representative for France

Tong Engineering, one of the world’s leading vegetable handling equipment manufacturers, is enhancing its business in the French market by appointing a full time Sales Executive to service new and existing customers.

The company, which has been manufacturing quality vegetable handling equipment for more than 80 years, has recently appointed French sales and engineering professional David Bergot, who will be assisting the company to develop sales of its market-leading range of machinery in the French and Belgian markets.

David, who has previous experience within both the engineering and agricultural industries, will be responsible for generating new business leads whilst offering a dedicated service to existing customers from initial orders through to aftersales care and spare parts.

“I am looking forward to helping progress Tong and offer even better service in my home markets,” commented David, “Tong is a well-known manufacturer throughout Europe and whilst the company currently has numerous existing customers in France and Belgium including Terre de France, Expandis and Barts Potatoes, I hope to build on their great reputation by focusing on developing relationships with existing and new customers, and providing a top quality, local service, from order to installation and beyond”.

Tong currently offers a range of quality handling equipment to both vegetable growers and packhouses, including vegetable grading, separating, dumping, filling, washing, weighing and packing equipment.

Their market-leading Caretaker mobile vegetable grader has the capacity to process up to eighty tons of crop per hour into two ton bins, and fitted with the company’s Blue Inverter technology with all electric inverter direct drive, the Caretaker offers up to 50% energy savings when compared to standard machines. In addition, the Tong EasyClean separator with Auto-Touch HMI touch screen control ensures that the Caretaker offers the very best cleaning and grading, whatever the crop type or weather conditions.

One of their current customers, Bayard Distribution, has been using Tong since 1996. Based in Picardie, France, Bayard Distribution’s potato production processes over 12 varieties of salads on over 200 acres of land.

With the need to process an increasing quantity of specialist salad potatoes, the company needed to invest in a potato grading and handling system, which could separate differing crop sizes, to include grading, cleaning and keeping the potatoes in optimum condition.

“As we tend to handle small sized crop, between 18 – 28mm, we needed to put in place a process that was as accurate and effective as possible. The design had to be mobile and incorporate mechanized processing and gentle handling, whilst focusing on improving throughput efficiency,” said Francoise Bayard of Bayard Distribution.

“We purchased a Caretaker complete with EasyClean separator and an EasyGrade screen grading module with integrated stone and clod separator from Tong, allowing us to clean, grade and separate stones and small potatoes all in one mobile process.  We have always found Tong machinery to be robust, reliable and efficient in all weather conditions, and only needing minimal amounts of maintenance.

Charlie Rich, Export Sales manager at Tong commented “We were able to design a complete solution for Bayard Distribution. We worked closely with Mr & Mrs Bayard to design a machine that combined every process they required within our Caretaker mobile vegetable grader.”

“Whilst we have done a great deal of business in France in the past, over recent years we have found limitations in using dealers to represent Tong. For this reason, we have made the decision to make a clear commitment to our French and Belgian customers by appointing David Bergot, who will work directly with them in all aspects from their new equipment needs to service and spare parts requirements. We’re delighted to have David on board and his knowledge and expertise will be invaluable.” added Edward Tong, operations director of Tong.

In addition to David Bergot being on hand as a direct Tong contact for French and Belgian customers, Tong has also launched a new French webpage, which not only contains downloadable information on the company’s latest product range, but also has a facility for customers to send details of their spare part requirements directly to Tong’s Service and Spares department, for quick and reliable spares delivery.

For more information please visit our French language webpage www.tongpeal.com/france