March 2021

28 n FOOD AND BEVERAGE March 2021 www.drivesncontrols.com Robot palletiser helps miller to cope with the pandemic demand for flour C arr’s is a flour miller with a 200-year heritage. It produces a variety of flours at its three UK mills, supplying retailers across the country, as well as Cumbrian stores close to its flagship site, Silloth Mill. In early 2020, the mill was packing 1.5kg bags of self-raising and plain flour by hand for a major supermarket. However, at the start of March, customer demand for flour rocketed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In response, the supermarket more than doubled its order from 120 to 250 tonnes per week – equivalent to 167,000 bags of flour. Carr’s immediately doubled its manual packing staff to 16, but also accelerated existing plans to automate the stacking process. Before the pandemic, it had placed an order for a Fanuc M710 palletising robot from Endoline Robotics. “We had always planned to automate the line,” explains the company’s operations director, Ben Clark. “However, faced with the unprecedented rise in demand, we employed a further eight manual workers on a short-term basis, until Endoline were able to install the robot.” The robot arm has a custom-engineered, self-cleaning vacuum gripper. It can move ten 1.5kg flour bags at a time from the bag- packing machine, and collate them gently into the required palletising pattern. Operating at a speed of 74 bags per minute, the system palletises the flour on 800 x 600mm Dusseldorf pallets, placing interlayers to increase stability. The robot system’s small footprint made it easy to integrate with the mills’ existing equipment. The system includes an infeed product collation system with two separate safety zones and two palletising positions for continuous operation. This eliminates the need for frequent starting and stopping of the upstream bag-filling equipment. Once the first pallet has been filled with the required number of bags, the robot continues palletising onto the second pallet. An operator replaces the first one, taking the filled pallet for stretch-wrapping. The wrapped pallets are delivered to the retailer and placed on the supermarket floor, allowing customers to pick their bags of flour directly from the pallet. The palletising robot has allowed Carr’s to keep its operation running around the clock without needing additional staff, while improving the quality of the stacked pallets. “We were constrained by the manual process,” Clark concludes. The robotic palletiser “has enabled us to redeploy the original eight workers to other, more skilled areas of the business. Quality and efficiency have improved, and we now have greater flexibility to increase productivity.” n When demand for flour exploded during the Covid pandemic, the miller Carr’s had to double its production for one supermarket from 120 to 250 tonnes per week. To help meet this demand, it installed a palletising robot, which has improved stacking quality and allowed it to operate around the clock. Carr’s robotic palletising system is delivering significant productivity gains