The food and beverage industry has been slower to adopt automation than some other areas of manufacturing. Short-term supplier contracts and a reliance on cheap labour have proved obstacles to investment for some food producers, limiting the ability to grow their production capabilities. Fortunately, the tide is turning, and automation systems incorporating robotics are now a common sight in many food factories around the UK and Ireland, boosting productivity, improving worker welfare and enabling manufacturers to swiftly respond to changing customer demand.

The dairy sector is no exception. The post-Covid labour crisis hit the entire food industry hard, and leading dairy producer Arla has warned that this long running shortage of workers is putting the UK’s food security under pressure. Dairy producers are now turning to robotic solutions to futureproof their businesses. Accurate, reliable and fast, robots are useful for repetitive, dull or laborious tasks where people add little value, such as packing, picking, placing and palletising, leaving the valuable human workforce to concentrate on the parts of production where they can make a real difference.

Increasing capacity

One company that is reaping the benefits of automation is Gü Indulgent Foods. Since its first chocolate soufflé pots hit the shelves in 2003, the firm has been on a strong upward trajectory, increasing its product range to include offerings such as milk chocolate mousses, salted caramel cheesecakes, and even gluten-free and vegan lines. As demand soared, Gü needed to expand its packing hall at its production facility in Bishops Stortford, UK, to ensure it could keep pace with orders. It turned to Fanuc partner Tekpak Automation for an automated answer to its productivity problem.

“Gü approached us with a request for a second packing line that needed to fit into a very compact area,” explains Darragh Sinnott, technical director for Tekpak Automation. “In addition to increasing their capacity, Gü wanted greater cartoning and palletising flexibility. This new line needed to handle Gü’s new quad-packs, as well as the existing variety of case formats: twin-packs x6 and twin-packs x4.”

Simulation software

Tekpak set about designing a system that could meet these exacting demands. With the help of Fanuc’s virtual programming software, Roboguide, it paid attention to requirements for payload, speed and reach, to discover the right robot models that would alleviate Gü’s production capacity constraints. 

“The end-to-end packaging line we installed for Gü begins at the depalletising stage,” explains Sinnott. “Gü’s famous filled glass ramekins are skimmed off two pallets, one layer at a time, onto a pair of receiving conveyors. One Fanuc R-2000iC/165F six-axis robot handles this job, and it also removes the layer card that separates each layer of ramekins. The pallets of ramekins are supported and indexed up by two industrial-grade scissor lifts fitted with servo motors that feed the depalletising robot. The same control system that controls the robot also controls the lifts, ensuring a seamless depalletising process.”

Palletising flexibility

The Tekpak system then collates the ramekins, loads them into cartons with integrated laser printing, and case packs with subsequent case labelling, before the final palletising process begins. A Fanuc R-2000iC/165F six-axis industrial robot is employed here.

“We created the required matrix of different twin and quad-pack case formats to give Gü greater palletising flexibility,” says Sinnott. “The palletising robot is equipped with automatic size change so there’s no requirement to change the end-of-arm tooling when switching from one pattern format to another. The operator simply selects the format on the iHMI screen and the robot automatically size changes and starts to palletise the new cases.”

Automation support

 “Fanuc robots are known for their reliability, so we were confident that their technology wouldn’t let us down,” Sinnott says. “From working with the simulation software during the planning stage of this project, we also knew that the model we’d selected would deliver the exact payload, reach and speed we needed for this installation.”

Sinnott adds, “The team of engineers that our automation and software engineers collaborate with, are an asset to a machine builder like Tekpak. Their level of programming knowledge is incredible. The team have helped us to set up complex applications and then trained our in-house software team so we can support the customer going forward.”

Andrzej Rosa is head of engineering for Gü Indulgent Foods. He adds: “The new packing line has given us greater flexibility and increased our production capacity. The robots are quick, robust and reliable and are a proving a valuable addition to our operation.”

Dale Farm Foods

Based in County Kildare, Power Food Technology is a specialist system integrator providing cooling and freezing solutions to the food industry. When it received a request from the UK and Ireland’s largest cheddar cheese producer, Dale Farm Foods, to install a new cooling and palletising line at its cheddar processing facility in Cookstown, Northern Ireland, it knew that robots would need to be at the heart of the solution.

“The weight of the cheese blocks that the system would need to handle was the biggest issue for us,” explains John Power, managing director of Power Food Technology. “The cheese arrives in 20kg blocks. Each layer comprises 10 blocks, and the pallets are five layers high. So we’re talking 1,000kg of cheese per pallet. That’s a lot of cheddar.”

Other than weight, the new palletising cell would also need to manage two product types at one time. “Two different recipes – for example, low-fat, mild, mature or extra mature cheddar – are fed through a common cooling system into the cell, so it was also essential that the solution had full traceability,” Power says. “Not only that, but the client wanted to increase palletising capability at the site from 9.5 tonnes per hour to 15.5.”

The Fanuc M-410iC/185 high payload, high-speed, 4-axis palletising robot with a three-metre reach was the choice for this application. Equipped with a hollow wrist to minimise cable snagging and reduce maintenance, it has been fitted with a custom mechanical gripper made by Power Food Technology to handle lifting the heavy cheese blocks with ease. This has solved one of the customer’s biggest health and safety headaches.

“The issue with palletising cheese blocks traditionally is that they’re heavy, and it’s very repetitive work,” outlines Power. “Lifting and dropping down from height is a problem for manual employees. It’s difficult enough for food producers to find labour for this kind of task at the moment, and retention is just as big a problem. If that person ends up becoming injured due to the heavy, repetitive nature of the work, it’s just compounding it further.”

Power continues, “Cheese is a product that really lends itself to automation, as automation is consistently reliable, offers full traceability and is highly efficient. This particular cell runs for 20hrs/day, followed by  a cleaning cycle, for 355 days/year. By leaving the robot to do the repetitive, heavy, potentially dangerous jobs such as palletising, food producers such as Dale Farm Foods can divert their employees to carry out more value-added tasks.”