Equipment supplier Carle&Montanari-OPM has manufactured robot picker cells since the Eighties and around 90% of its business comes from confectionery manufacturers.
David Madison, sales director at Carle&Montanari-OPM USA, said: “In the confectionery industry in the United Stateswe are seeing a lot of retail ready packaging (RRP). So we’re doing displays with lids where you pull the lid off and immediately the product is ready for display.”
“The former machines were slightly more mechanical in nature. Today it’s very easy to do a changeover,” he added.
For example, the robots may be used to place pralines in assortment trays, then minutes later be employed to put wrapped bars into point of purchase displays. Or a confectioner may need to pack a finished product into large retail displays for club stores such as Costco or Sam’s Club and later put the same product into cases for vending machine customers.
“The vending operators don’t want all the packaging. All they want is product to put into their machines,” said Madison. “Today’s machines are more flexible, so we are able to adapt to new sizes and market trends very quickly.”
Speed, standardization and vision-guided solutions Madison claimed picker cell robots were a relatively small investment and added that speeds had reached great heights.
"Speed is not an issue. We have robotic systems that have been running for years running 600 pieces per minute on very large candy bars and we are still able to run those speeds today but with a lot more flexibility," he said.
"We're seeing more and more flexibility driven towards vision guided solutions rather than capturing each piece and holding it. That allows the customer to literally do a changeover in seconds rather than minutes."
He said a big challenge for confectioners was standardization for robot picker cells that enable machine operators to learn one control platform that is suitable for multiple pack formats such as flow wrappers and twist wrappers.
