FEATURE Food & Beverage
Automating carrot production
Harvesting 4000 acres of root crops a year, Preston-based Huntapac Produce is laying the groundwork to boost its automation packing efficiency, starting with a customised Brillopak vegetable case loading
F
ounded during WWII, family- run carrot farming business Preston-based Huntapac Produce, is now one of the largest
in Europe and a supplier to most of the major British supermarkets since 1974. Now, the company’s operations director and robotics advocate Will Hunter is on a mission to introduce the best quality control, process and packaging technology to boost productivity with the fastest ROI. “There’s an accepted truth within the farming community that automation can address labour shortages and improve how packs are presented into retail trays. Despite this, it can be hard for many to justify a seven-year ROI on traditional pick and place robots,” said Hunter. Exploring numerous robotic pick- and-place options over the last decade, an innovative mechanical case loading system designed by Brillopak is delivering against Hunter’s exacting criteria. With an estimated ROI of 2.5-years, Huntapac tasked Brillopak to engineer an aff ordable, compact, bespoke tray packing system to accumulate and present carrot packs into neat layer formations in retail-ready crates. An accumulation system based on Brillopak’s PunnetPAKer design with an innovative retractable overhead push-and-slide mechanism more than halved the ROI. Brillopak’s specially-adapted BR2 vegetable-packing machine allows Huntapac to run diff erent sized and weighted carrot packs, from 500 grams to 1.5 kilograms, as well as diff erent packaging materials including new recyclable substrates, without incurring time delays by switching robot end eff ectors.
Field to yield improvements Presenting up to 80 carrot packs per minute into retail trays, Huntapac replaced one of its traditional rotary table manual crate packing lines with the automated system earlier this year. Operating 16 hours a day, fi ve days a week, 1200 tons of carrots are graded, washed, polished, cooled, optically-
16 February 2022 | Automation
graded by size and quality, packed and checkweighed, before Once loaded into the cases, the carrots are then transported to a cold store, ensuring the vegetables stay fresh and maintain their high quality before dis-tribution across the country to fi ll the supermarket shelves. Previously reliant on manual labour to maintain a constant case-loading pace,
being fed into the Brillopak case packing machine. Four packs are then presented individually onto a collation support plate, nudging each one along, until there are four slightly overlapping packs. Director David Jahn describes the sequence: “The concept follows a similar principle to a coin-pusher arcade game. As one lands on the previous pack, gravity pushes them over to create crate-ready layer. As soon as the four packs are in position, a side load slider gently pushes the carrot packs onto a fl ap opening device located directly above the crate. Simultaneously to the carrot packs lowering into the crate, the slider fl ap lifts, retracts overhead and drops behind the next set of carrots, pushing next accumulation towards the crate fl ap.”
Ground for growth Once a marginal business, today automation has become an imperative in fresh produce packing operations. “In many instances where margins
now a disparate, unconnected bagging integrated into the BR2 case packing system.
“By uniting all the electronics up the line, the machines communicate with each other via a common control platform installed by Brillopak. This helps to pre- empt bottlenecks, address production lags and respond instantly if packs get trapped. Should any of these events occur, the upstream packing and checkweighing machines slow or stop automatically until all the processes are in-step with each other again,” explains Hunter. “The speed is very much governed by the processing speed of our baggers and checkweighers. Although the case loader is capable of going faster, we wouldn’t want it to compromise the quality of our produce.” With most carrot crates destined for supermarket shelves, consistent display presentation of the carrots, face up and positioned straight up with the branding and labels clearly visible to consumers is vital. Huntapac’s existing merging system and bag fl ippers ensure that each carrot pack is horizontally aligned before
are already compressed, aff ordable automation can be more eff ective than implementing traditional lean manufacturing enhancements which tend to only deliver incremental effi ciency improvements – especially when labour input costs are rising higher than fresh produce commodity prices,” said Jahn. Not only does the reduction of manual work streamline packing processes, it also reduces waste and improves worker safety. Flexible machines which can be adapted to seasonal produce and future packing and product applications further increases their viability, with less risk. Due to the success of this installation, Hunter is considering automating case loading on all 16 carrot lines, potentially creating a dedicated parsnips line too, and even automating the crate destacking and palletising phase to complete its packing automation cycle in the future.
CONTACT:
Brillopak
www.brillopak.co.uk
automationmagazine.co.uk
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