BARCODINg, LABELLINg & PACKAgINg
This UniPAKer works well for tray-sealed meat packs, which can’t be handled at very high speeds as the film lid may tear
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UNIPAKER “MEATS” WITH APPROVAL AT PORK PRODUCER
A
leading UK pork producer has become the first meat industry success story for Brillopak’s UniPAKer robotic crate
packer. The last piece of the jigsaw in a new multi-million pound line, the clever robot cell has enabled several staff to be redeployed onto more valuable, less repetitive tasks at a time when labour is in short supply. Having invested heavily in a state-of-the-art
line for cutting, portioning and packaging fresh pork into trays, in 2020, the producer turned its attention to the end-of-line crate packing operation. This process was still manual and COVID and Brexit were compounding the issue of labour availability. After carrying out some research, the producer
approached Brillopak, an agile and innovative designer of robotic packing automation. “The fact that they are an independent
company was important to me, as I know that, as a dynamic meat business, we are more likely to get the attention we need. I also knew that they were working with major supermarkets on automation projects so they had the experience,” says the company’s factory operations manager, who was responsible for leading the project. The main motivation for automating its crate
packing operation wasn’t to reduce head count per se, rather to maximise the potential of existing staff by redeploying them onto more value-adding tasks. “This in turn will enable us to keep the
people we have, as finding good labour is becoming an issue,” he explains. The producer’s brief was for a small
footprint system that could pack multiple tray- sealed fresh pork SKUs, ranging in size from 250g up to 1kg, into plastic retail half crates
24 MAY 2021 | FACTORY&HANDLINgSOLUTIONS
(300x400mm) at a line speed of 66 ppm, with minimal manual intervention. Brillopak proposed a solution with its award-
winning UniPAKer robot at its centre. This trail-blazing system has already revolutionised the packing of bagged fresh produce such as apples, sprouts and potatoes into crates and now looks set to be a game-changer in the meat, fish & poultry industry. While tray-sealed packs of meat appear to
be a fairly straightforward item to pick and place (they are uniform with flat surfaces and are not overly delicate), this project posed specific challenges that Brillopak had to overcome in specifying a solution. For maximum efficiency, trays have to enter
the robot cell in the same orientation. On this line, however, some trays exit the tray sealer narrow-edge leading, whereas others are wide-
The clever robot cell has enabled several staff to be redeployed onto more valuable, less repetitive tasks at a time when labour is in short supply
edge leading, depending on the tooling format. Brillopak addressed this potential issue with the installation of a servo turner that repositions trays after they leave the tray sealer. The other challenge that this project presented
was meeting the customer’s throughput expectations within the available space – the lines in this factory are incredibly close together. A standard single delta robot cell would have
fitted into the space, but wouldn’t have been fast enough to make the project viable from a payback perspective. Adding a second robot would have made the system fast enough, but on an unacceptably large footprint. Brillopak’s solution was to specify its UniPAKer
in a dual-pick configuration, in which a single robot performs two picks, then places the packs in the crate, two at a time. This cost-effective and space-efficient option works well for tray-sealed
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