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Freshpet automates with robotic chub loader

This on-trend pet food company removed labor from its packaging line and handled increased throughput thanks to a first-of-its kind case packing solution.

Refrigerated or chilled display cases are importing the formerly shelf-stable pet food category into the fresh food portion of your supermarket.
Refrigerated or chilled display cases are importing the formerly shelf-stable pet food category into the fresh food portion of your supermarket.

Freshpet brand pet food is extending fresh, preservative-free options to dogs and cats—or at least to their doting owners. The company has pioneered this new market via refrigerated cooler displays placed in more than 16,000 supermarkets in the U.S., further stretching the boundaries of premium pet food.

While fresh pet food products likewise command a premium price point, month-to-month sales increases of 1% to 3% indicate people are willing to pay. Sales channels reach beyond the expected vehicles of Petco and PetSmart to cover the grocery gamut, from low-cost Walmart, to high-end Whole Foods. Even discount clubs like Costco and food-featuring big box stores like Target are in on the fresh pet food action.

Freshpet’s plant is an SQF level 3-approved facility where meat, vegetables, and other ingredients are processed and packaged. One popular dog food line is packaged in chubs akin to popular breakfast sausage brands, emphasizing to consumers a wholesome, farm-fresh feel. Chubs are available in 1-, 1.5-, 2-, 5-, and 6-lb. sizes across several flavors.

To meet growing demand of these chubs, the engineering team at Freshpet’s Bethlehem, PA, facility began upping production volume and planning for two new high-capacity lines. In researching how to automate and improve production, a major sore spot was revealed in the labor-intensive hand packing of finished chubs into corrugated cases. To alleviate this bottleneck, Engineering Manager Sam Torres turned to JLS Automation and a robotic pick and place solution.

Packaging line bottleneck
Package-ready processed pet food enters a chubmaker while still hot to be vertically formed, filled, and sealed. The film, a multi-layer, high oxygen barrier polyethylene that is digitally printed, is fed into an Oystar Chubmaker to receive the contents, and a folder forms the chub to create the familiar tube shape.

Notably, a new automatic splicer from Butler has shortened film splicing-related downtime from six minutes or more to a minute or less. Because of the hot fill process, the chub then travels through an MMC serpentine chiller to cool. A date coder prints dates and lot codes, and chubs are conveyed down the line to meet cases erected in a Pearson case erector for case packing, prior to being sealed by another Pearson machine and manually palletized with offline stretch wrap.

Until recently, the junction on the line between date-coded chubs and erected cases was where the heaviest manual labor took place. Increases in volume and speed, approaching the facility’s current top speed of 120 chubs/minute, exacerbated the issue.

“Imagine two or three people picking and packing 110 chubs per minute, just putting them in boxes,” says Torres. “After a couple hours, they were beat. So we’d be constantly rotating them; meaning we’d have to keep people around in order to have enough folks on hand to be able to do rotations.”

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