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Robotic Lines Clear Peeps’ Automation Hurdles

Produced in the billions, PEEPS® are so fragile and their packaging formats so varied that they resisted automation until a gentle but fast robotic pick and place primary packaging system solved a host of problems at once.

Peeps are loaded into trays by the JLS Talon robotic pick-and-place system, featuring ABB FlexPicker vision-guided robots and Soft Robotics gripper EOATs.
Peeps are loaded into trays by the JLS Talon robotic pick-and-place system, featuring ABB FlexPicker vision-guided robots and Soft Robotics gripper EOATs.

Founded in 1923 by Russian immigrant Sam Born, Just Born Quality Confections is a third-generation family-owned candy manufacturer known for iconic national brands PEEPS®, MIKE AND IKE®, and HOT TAMALES®, along with several regionally known candies.

Now the U.S.’s tenth largest candy company, Just Born is led by family owners Chairman of the Board David Shaffer and CEO Ross Born. The company’s products are made domestically by 500 associates, most of whom are at company headquarters and manufacturing facility in Bethlehem, PA, where Peeps, Mike and Ikes, and Hot Tamales are produced and packaged.

As you’d likely guess, the Peeps brand is the company’s most well known—particularly the chick- and bunny-shaped marshmallow candies synonymous with the Easter holiday. Each year, Just Born produces 2 billion Peeps for all of the four major holidays. But Easter represents a majority of that total.

Things that are produced in the billions almost invariably require automation. But other than the most standardized, high-volume sellers, Peeps are both made and packaged in a wide enough variety of formats so as to have resisted packaging automation over the years.

Plus, the products’ delicate, sticky marshmallow composition and sugar coatings make them tough for machines to handle. In fact, one line of Peeps even required virtually all manual labor, at least until recently. To get the picture, let’s take a look at the product line. And bear in mind, we’re talking just the Peeps here, not Mike and Ikes, Hot Tamales, or other dissimilar formats.

Peeps Brand formats and SKU proliferation
The highest volume Peeps shapes, the basic chicks and bunnies, are sold as what the manufacturer calls cluster products. The general format is a 1x5 cluster of Peeps chicks, or a 1x4 cluster of Peeps bunnies, loosely joined “shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip,” within a pack. These single-file formats are most often oriented next to an identical cluster (or two) within a flow-wrapped chipboard tray. Each clustered row of chicks is picked and placed into individual trays so as to remain separated from its neighboring tray of chicks, creating two 1x5 clustered rows in a typical 2x5 format, 10-count pack. The bunnies’ geometry allows them to pack into a single flow-wrapped chipboard tray without separation in 1x4, 2x4, or 3x4 formats for 4-, 8-, or 12-count packs respectively. These standard chicks and bunnies products don’t deviate much from this handful of high-volume formats.

Most important to understand about bunnies is that, at least internally, Just Born considers them to be two-dimensional (2D) products with variation only occurring along two axes. This species of Peep was already automated some time ago, with integrated lines that are devoted only to this 2D format.

In recent years, Just Born rolled out its PEEPS® DELIGHTS™ collection of chocolate-dipped marshmallow chicks that are decidedly three-dimensional (3D) in geometry. The Delights line consists of individual Peeps. Instead of an attached-at-the-hip cluster, each individual higher-end, lower-volume Peep needed to be placed in its own nesting divot within a thermoformed tray, creating 1x3 product that is then flow-wrapped into a printed film pack. These 3D Peeps thermoformed trays had, until recently, been hand-placed because the product itself was so delicate.

“You can imagine the amount of labor that went into that. Three of the four belts typically had a crew that was around 13 to 15 people depending on what product run,” says Randall Copeland, senior vice president supply chain operations at Just Born. “And the fourth belt required 28 people on the line, so when you scheduled that fourth belt before this installation, you just wiped out the whole labor force, and this product was the only one you could run.”

Goals and challenges in automating
Just Born’s primary goal in looking to automation was to solve this labor problem. An additional goal was to automate repetitive, potentially ergonomically unfriendly labor out of the line in an environment where, as we all know, good labor is hard to find.

“We needed a way to efficiently produce our 3D Delights line,” says Just Born president and COO David Yale. “We think we’ll see tremendous growth on that part of the business.”

And if they were going to take the plunge, they needed to automate tray loading of all three Peeps categories—2D clustered Peeps, 3D clustered Peeps, and 3D Peeps singles. While the 2D Peeps already had dedicated, automated lines, a new line replacing the 3D Peeps manual labor belts—say a robotic pick and place line that could handle these three products styles—would grant flexibility throughout the Bethlehem facility to shift production and labor around as needed.

But the aforementioned degree of variability was an immediate hurdle. Now that it’s up and running, the new line handles 16 different recipes. The three different product lines equate to three different EOATs on the robotic pick and place system. There are ten different trays accommodating different cluster formats on five paperboard and five thermoform tray styles requiring denesting. Integrating a system that would be capable of such variation was daunting.

A secondary challenge, or more accurately, the other primary challenge, was the delicate handling that the products required at high speeds. Whether single or in a 1x5 unit cluster, Peeps can’t even be allowed to touch one another once they’re formed. They’d stick together, the sugar coating would rub off, and they’d gum up the entire works in the line.

“The marshmallow we use isn’t like the ones you buy in the bag, it is much softer,” Copeland says. “We could toughen them up for packaging if we used a bunch of additives like gelatin and starches, but who wants to eat that? The softness is very important for the identity of our product, but at the same time, any robot we’d be using couldn’t break through that sugar layer. As soon as you touch raw marshmallow, it is the stickiest object known to man. We’d have to shut down.” [See sidebar on page 40—Sticky considerations—for more on automation added to handle sticky products].

An integrated robotic solution
Ross Born and his Peeps-producing team first approached their acquaintance and fellow Pennsylvanian Craig Souser, CEO of JLS Automation, about this project at the JLS booth at PACK EXPO International 2016 in Chicago. Just Born was particularly drawn to an in-booth JLS robotic pick-and-place demo using a then-new Soft Robotics pneumatic gripper.

“Do you think this would work on something as delicate as Peeps?” Born asked him with a knowing grin. The Peeps purveyors had done their homework on the gripper, knew of JLS’s use of Soft Robotics as end-of-arm tooling in other projects, and had an existing relationship. JLS was thus on the early shortlist for project integration.

Just Born had a strong preference for a U.S. manufacturer. Being in the same time zone was even better. Just up the Pennsylvania turnpike? Hard to beat.

“Almost every piece on the eventual line is made in the U.S.,” Copeland says. “That has a lot of advantages to us in turnaround time for service.”

After a formal RFP/RFQ process, Just Born selected an integrated Talon robotic pick-and-place system, developed and integrated by JLS, that would handle all primary packaging and integrate seamlessly upstream and downstream. The entire system was integrated and assembled at JLS’s facility prior to installation.

In this case, vendor selection as part of integration was a collaborative process. JLS has its preferred suppliers and experience with certain OEMs, and Just Born had existing installations, relationships, and parts inventories of its own. In specifying equipment for the project, reliability was agreed upon to be key. Just Born gave JLS a lot of latitude, with one caveat. The only true Just Born “must do” was Allen-Bradley controls from Rockwell as much as possible.

“It was our desire, and JLS’ suggestion, that we make it have enough capabilities such that you can lose an entire cell and keep going at full rate,” Copeland says. “And usually it’s not anything to do with the cell. Normally it’s related to the wrapper, so we have very, very good wrappers, but short interruptions in product flow happens for a variety of reasons including routine operator checks. So you need to be able to shut down a wrapper to do normal maintenance for a few minutes and not have to worry about the lines going down.”

This is how they accomplished it.

Front of the line
After processing, individual Peeps or clusters thereof are conveyed on a common, unidirectional product transfer conveyor. An accumulation system by Rotzinger/Transver that had been used solely for product cooling is now used, with some integration from JLS and K2 Kinetics, as an automated buffer to accumulate Peeps in the unlikely event of downstream equipment issues while allowing the Peep cooking/depositing system to continue production at rate. After the accumulation system the product is conveyed to a JLS-provided product spreader to ensure good spacing for Peeps product across the wide pick belt.

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