FANUC Robot Ends Packaging Bottleneck at Food Factory

Producing and distributing cooled salad dressings, herb butter and wild garlic butter, Brunos recently realised that it would require help maintaining pace with demand from a packaging and palletising perspective.

“We had reached our limits, as up to this point we had 2-3 employees packing bottles manually into cardboard boxes and they could hardly keep up with the speed of our production line,” explains Managing Director Michael Arnold. “We began thinking about an automated solution for the palletising process, but our space was rather tight. We therefore needed a solution with a compact footprint that would tie in with our existing automated processes in terms of quality and productivity.”

Brunos turned to the expertise of Robotec Solutions AG, a local provider of robot-assisted automation with more than 800 successful installations to its name across a diverse range of sectors. To reliably implement customer solutions, Robotec leverages the quality of FANUC industrial robots and cobots (collaborative robots).

Jörg Lanz, Head of Sales at Robotec Solutions AG, says: “Working together with our customers, our most important task is to find the best automation solution for the application. In this project to palletise the bottled salad dressings, our main challenges were cycle time, space constraints and palletising patterns.”

The production line at Brunos fills bottles individually before placing them together in groups of 6, 10 and 12. These groups then undergo shrink-wrapping in foil.

“We had to pre-group the packs and perform part-rotation to create the desired palletising pattern,” reveals Lanz. “After each layer, the robot places an additional intermediate layer on top. This operation takes place without changing the gripper to help minimise cycle time.”

The ideal robot for the palletising task? A strong yet lightweight and compact FANUC M-710𝑖C/50 6-axis industrial robot with 50 kg payload and 2050 mm reach.