Swedish food producer sold on ‘cobots’

Collaborative robots at Atria Scandinavia work alongside operators to handle repetitive tasks, decreasing changeover time from six hours to 20 minutes and enabling new packaging applications.

Atria employs three six-axis collaborative robots to automate tasks such as labeling, carton erecting, and palletizing.
Atria employs three six-axis collaborative robots to automate tasks such as labeling, carton erecting, and palletizing.

Atria Scandinavia is one of Northern Europe’s leading manufacturers of vegetarian and gourmet products for convenience markets and retail chains in need of round-the-clock service. Each day, packages of shrimp, olives, artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, and other specialties are labeled, packed in cartons, and palletized at the company’s four factories.

At one of Atria’s plants, in Skene in western Sweden, many of the plant’s 30 employees are now working side by side with collaborative robots from Universal Robots. The three “cobots”—two UR5 5-kg-payload robots, and one UR10 10-kg-payload robot—were installed to minimize labor and downtime, and increase packaging line efficiency.

Says Johnny Jansson, Atria’s Technical Manager, “Our goal is to get reliable product lines where we can produce efficiently and effectively while keeping our staffing costs down. As a food producer, it is extremely important for us to minimize downtime, so we can supply fresh goods at a competitive price.”

With Atria’s larger automated equipment, if a malfunction occurs, it can cause several hours of downtime and may require an outside specialist to fix. In considering the addition of cobots, Atria was looking for equipment that would provide minimal downtime, with operators able to solve whatever problem might arise.

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