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Robot moves the case, not the product, for gentle handling

Co-manufacturer/co-packer invests in robotic case loading for delicate snack foods, where the robot manipulates the case, rather than the package, to eliminate product damage.

The HFP (Highly Flexible Packer) Twin case-packing system uses two six-axis robots to move the cases, rather than the products.
The HFP (Highly Flexible Packer) Twin case-packing system uses two six-axis robots to move the cases, rather than the products.

For some packaged products, even the most delicate touch of a pick-and-place robot can result in product damage. This was the challenge Chicago-based Assemblers, Inc., a contract manufacturer/packager and repacker of food products, faced in 2016 when selecting an automated case-packing system for bagged snack foods.

Assemblers is a family-owned business with two facilities in Illinois that offer primary and secondary snack food manufacturing, liquid filling, and a range of primary and secondary food packaging services. It handles a wide range of products, including snack foods, water enhancers, refrigerated items, and confectionery products, among others.

For contract packagers such as Assemblers, investing in automation isn’t always practical. To efficiently handle ever-changing job sizes, packaging formats, and product counts, manual labor offers the most flexibility. But when the company locked in a regular customer with consistent packaging needs, it looked into robotics for the first time.

The customer’s product is a snack food similar to a potato chip, but not identified as such by CEO & President Joel Rosenbacher, who is committed to customer confidentiality. Assemblers handles the snack at its Chicago location, a 500,000-sq-ft plant with 20 packaging lines. There it manufactures the snack, packs it in single-serve and full-size pillow packs, and loads the bags in into shipping cases.

Initially, the bags were hand-packed into the cases and sealed with semi-automatic case closers. According to Rosenbacher, the switch to a robotic case packer was ultimately done to save on labor costs. “We knew we were going to be consistently producing this product,” he says. “So once the dust settled, and we were running the same thing over and over, the process appeared to be a very good candidate for automation.”

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