A competitive edge

By Alan Spreckley

For today’s food and drink companies, keeping up with rapidly changing consumer behaviour and expectations means having production and packaging equipment that can also keep pace.

One of the most pressing challenges facing today's producers is to ensure they have the most flexible systems in place that can readily adapt to changing circumstances.

When it comes to ensuring flexibility in picking, packing and palletising applications, today's robotic technology offers a very real opportunity for UK food companies to boost their competitiveness.

The food and beverage industry is undoubtedly one of the major success areas for automated production and for robotics. In the last three years, demand for industrial robots in this sector has grown by an impressive 300 percent, with units handling a wide range of both production and handling tasks.

This growth has come from a increased realisation of the possibilities of today's robots, coupled with developments in the technology that have made it suitable for taking on an ever expanding list of tasks.

The flexibility of robotic technology, for example, makes it ideally matched to the inherently fast changing nature of many food and beverage processes. On the packaging side in particular, robots can be quickly adapted to handle new product designs and package shapes, with no need for extensive reprogramming or reconfiguration.

Significant strides forward in robotic control and gripper technology have also meant that more products can now be handled by robots. Even the most fragile products, such as bread or brittle goods like biscuits can now be lifted, moved and packed with greatly reduced levels of product wastage.

The availability of high-speed picking, packaging and palletising robots with ever greater speed and precision capabilities also opens up new possibilities for fast performance, particularly ideal for meeting tight order deadlines or increased order quantities.  

In addition to increased up-time and productivity, robotic automation can also help to reduce much of the costs and time associated with employee issues such as workplace accidents and increasingly demanding workplace legislation.

Despite all these benefits, however, and a heritage spanning over 30 years, robots are still often deemed to be 'new technology' by many users, anxious about perceived complexity or cost. Smaller companies especially, which have limited financial and technical resources and are consequently more risk-averse, often tend to see robots as the preserve of larger companies.

In fact, it is precisely these smaller companies at which the developments in robotic technology have been aimed. In the last three decades, the technology has been steadily tweaked with a whole raft of improvements aimed at reducing complexity and increasing the range of applications where robots can be used.

Most importantly for end users, robots have also become increasingly affordable, opening up new opportunities particularly for small to medium enterprises where they might previously have been regarded as prohibitively expensive.

That robots can bring very real benefits to companies of all sizes is well proven. For users worldwide the decision to automate with robots has provided a key competitive advantage in an industry where margins are tight and the pressure to deliver on time and in the right quantities is paramount.

For those needing proof of the benefits that robots could bring to their process, we can point to a wide range of real-life applications. Whether it's delivering faster, more accurate palletising at Cadbury's, sorting and packing cheese products by size at Ilchester Cheese, or handling and palletising the world's leading brand of champagne, robots offer very real possibilities for the future of food industry.

For more information, please email david.marshall@gb.abb.com. For more details about the benefits of robots, visit www.abb.com/robotics.  

Alan Spreckley is Food Segment Manager at ABB Robotics, UK