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Robotic pick-and-place solution increases production line throughput

11 December 2023

The US-based Sweet Candy Company produces a wide variety of chocolate jelly sticks. To meet increasing customer demand for its signature product, a Schubert Pickerline has enabled the company to add a whole extra shift to its production.

‘Our semi-automated packaging equipment 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” explained Geoff Dzuida, VP Operations at Sweet Candy Company. “We turned to Schubert for a fully-automated robotic solution to help us keep up with demand.”

The company needed a robotics-based packaging solution to handle the larger production volume that is also able to flexibly adjust the amount of products per box. “Schubert became the very obvious choice for us,” said Rick Kay, President and Owner at Sweet Candy Company.

The Schubert Pickerline that was finally specified for use by the company packages the chocolate sticks into pre-erected trays. Unique 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 as the product is sold by weight and not by count. The adjustment can be done during production via a manual input on the machine’s human machine interface (HMI).

Chocolate sticks transition into the packaging system from an 860mm wide cooling tunnel belt. Within the packaging system, the products are pre-grouped in a multi-pick fashion in layer formations of 15-17 sticks by 16 vision guided SCARA robots. Previously erected carton bases are then indexed into a transport chain and a robot loads the carton trays with the first pre-grouped layer. In the next step a wax paper is placed on top of the first layer, also executed by a robot. Then the second product layer is loaded into the tray by a robot and finally, the box is closed by another robot with the pre-erected lid being placed onto the fille carton bottom.

By automating the packaging processes, the company is now able to be more flexible to fulfill the fast-changing demands of its customers. 


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