Sweet Candy Company is utilizing Schubert’s robotic pick-and-place solution to package its Chocolate Sticks into pre-erected trays, a solution expected to allow for flexibility in loading operations, as well as facilitate easy operation and mechanical stability.
Due to its previous semi-automated equipment, Sweet Candy Company was able to keep running its plant during the COVID-19 pandemic, even increasing the throughput of its line to add on another shift.
Geoff Dzuida, VP Operations at Sweet Candy Company, explains that the machinery has “done a great job of getting us to where we are today, but it wasn’t the right equipment for us to take the next step and it required a lot of human intervention and manipulation. Additionally, it was only packing about 50% of the upstream product, and so the other 50% needed to be packed by hand.
“We turned to Schubert for a robotic solution that solved our labour equation and also allowed us to make that change in throughput.”
The Schubert Pickerline was chosen to handle a larger production volume while maintaining the ability to flexibly adjust the number of chocolate sticks per box, given that the product is sold by weight, not count.
An 860 mm wide cooling tunnel belt carries the chocolate sticks into the packaging system, wherein 16 vision-guided, F4-axis, scara-type robots multi-pick and pre-group the products into layer formations of between 15 and 17 sticks. As the previously erected carton bases are indexed into a transport chain, an F4 robot loads a fixed number of sticks into an initial layer at the bottom of the pack.
A layer of wax paper is then placed on top of the first layer by an F4 robot, and on top of this, a second product later is applied. Operators can adjust this layer by +/-1 products via manual input at the machine HMI. An F4 robot then places the pre-erected lid onto the carton to close it.
“Sweet Candy Company is a great customer with lots of potential for growth,” says Armin Klotz, sales account manager at Schubert. “By opting to automate their packaging processes, the confectioner is now able to take on another level of flexibility and product availability to succeed in fulfilling the demands of their continuously growing customer base.”
In another partnership, Schubert recently provided a bespoke, industrial-scale packaging line to implement an aluminium strip into John West’s ambient tuna packaging. This was set to enable the strip to be recycled with the can and avoid the use of 65 tons of plastic shrink wrap every year.
Meanwhile, Paxiom Group company ValTara has announced the launch of PKR-Dual Delta Robot, its pick-and-place case packing cell. It is designed for efficient, versatile, and low-cost packing processes for handle bags, pouches, cartons, trays, and a range of other packaging products – making it applicable to various different manufacturers and industries.
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