ROBOTICS
“Automating palletising operations can
relieve workers from all the associated health risks, reduce tedium and improve overall well-being. This allows them to both protect their health and focus on other more suited tasks, such as quality assurance,” concludes Mark.
Increasing throughput US-based Sweet Candy Company turned to robotics to enable it to add another shift to its production line to satisfy growing customer demand. The company produces a wide variety of chocolate jelly sticks coated in milk or dark chocolate. The range includes 10 standard flavours and the addition of special seasonal flavours throughout the year. During the global pandemic Sweet Candy
Company ran it plant as usual because demand for the chocolate sticks kept increasing, which required it to look for new ways to increase throughput. The original production line was semi- automated. “It had 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,” explains Geoff Dzuida, VP Operations at Sweet Candy Company. “We turned to Schubert for a robotic solution to solve our labour equation and which would also allow us to increase throughput.” The company needed a robotics-based packaging solution to allow it to handle large production volumes. It also needed to be able to flexibly adjust the number of products per box. The solution was found with a Schubert Pickerline which today packages the chocolate sticks into pre-erected trays. Special to this packaging task is that a
layer of wax paper is placed between the two layers of products. Another important feature is the ‘on the fly’ product count modification. The bottom layer has a fixed number of products, and the top layer can be adjusted by +/-1 products during production. This adjustment is necessary because the product is sold by weight and not by
US-based Sweet Candy Company turned to SCARA robotics to enable it to add another shift to its production line.
26 Kennedy’s Confection February 2024
KennedysConfection.com
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