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Better butter palletizing

California’s largest dairy co-op replaces manual palletizing with four robotic palletizers, each with the ability to handle four different case sizes and two pallet configurations at one time

A six-axis robotic palletizer at California Dairies can handle cases of butter up to 50 lb from four packaging lines at one time.
A six-axis robotic palletizer at California Dairies can handle cases of butter up to 50 lb from four packaging lines at one time.

California Dairies, Inc. (CDI) is the largest dairy cooperative in California, co-owned by 400-plus dairy producers that ship 17 billion pounds of milk annually. Its products include butter, powdered milk, and fluid milk, which are sold in all 50 states as well as in 50 foreign countries. Five facilities across California process and package the co-op’s butter and powdered milk varieties, which are prepared in a range of product types and packaging formats, with fluid milk sold directly to its customers for processing.

At its 55-acre site in Visalia, CA, CDI produces a half-million pounds of butter every day. Now, just picture palletizing that scale of product by hand each day—it’s a physically taxing and costly proposition. But that’s just what the Visalia plant was doing until late 2016, when it automated the process. Over the previous decade, three CDI plants, including Visalia, had automated their powdered milk palletizing operations, but, says Devin DiLuzio, Engineering & Maintenance Manager for CDI, it wasn’t until last year the Visalia plant was ready to make the financial investment in robotic palletizing for butter.

“It was a very large capital investment for us,” he says. “So, at the time, early on, it just wasn’t a priority for our capital expenditures, but last year we decided to do it.”

One of the main drivers for automation was the skyrocketing cost of labor in California. The plant required eight to 10 operators per shift over three shifts, 24 hr/day, 365 days/yr to manually load cases of butter that could weigh up to 50 lb each. “The palletizing system also made sense for us when you consider the potential for injury resulting from hand loading,” DiLuzio adds.

CDI chose robotic palletizers from Columbia/Okura LLC, the same supplier it had selected to automate the palletizing of its powdered milk products. Given the success of those projects, DiLuzio was very comfortable selecting Columbia/Okura robots for the case packing of butter.

The Visalia facility provides a number of customers with butter products, packaged on 14 lines. DiLuzio says the main requirement for a robotic palletizing solution was that it be able to handle the range of case sizes and pallet patterns required by its customers. “That the robots were capable of stacking numerous types and sizes of packages was by far the most important thing for us,” he says.

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