Picking and Placing Cookies At Voortman

In the food indus­try, prod­ucts can change in the blink of an eye. For­tu­nate­ly, sev­er­al food pro­cess­ing plants have made the switch to robot­ic pick and place sys­tems to help auto­mate their lines and improve their over­all production.

One of these plants, Voort­man Cook­ies, has added sev­er­al new automa­tions to their plant recent­ly, accord­ing to an August 2013 issue of Pack­ag­ing Digest. One of those pur­chas­es was a top load­ing, three-robot pick-and-place car­toon­ing sys­tem to ​“rein­vig­o­rate” their cook­ie pro­duc­tion plant locat­ed in Canada.

Voort­man Cook­ies has been around for decades, and they are known for their sev­en lines of cook­ies and three lines of wafers, the arti­cle stat­ed. With this new sys­tem in place, the cook­ie mak­er has pick and place automa­tion that is ver­sa­tile enough to bend and flex with any cook­ie changes Voort­man can throw at it.

How­ev­er, this isn’t Voortman’s first go around with automa­tion for their com­pa­ny. They also have a ​“spi­der” type robot that was installed in 2005 that has pack­aged 18 dif­fer­ent cook­ie vari­eties in eight years, and a Demau­rex sys­tem that has been work­ing for 16 years, per­form­ing the pick­ing and plac­ing of baked cook­ies from anoth­er line.

As com­pa­nies add pick and place robot­ics to their pro­duc­tion lines, they start to see the advan­tages that these pick and place­ment sys­tems can have for their facility’s pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Not only does a pick and place robot speed up pro­duc­tion, but it will also pick up and place the prod­uct del­i­cate­ly, with­out dam­ag­ing it the way a human hand could. With exact pres­sures and sen­sors, pick and place robot­ics pick up items with the same amount of force every time.

Also, by automat­ing with pick-and-place robot­ics, com­pa­nies are able to move their human work­ers to less tedious, more ful­fill­ing posi­tions with­in the com­pa­ny, some­times even teach­ing them how to man the robot­ic systems.

Voort­man, along with sev­er­al oth­er food indus­try man­u­fac­tur­ers, believe that automa­tion is key to con­tin­u­ing to improve their prod­ucts. They may con­tin­ue to add automa­tion for years to come.

Robots​.com, an inte­gra­tor of Fanuc, Motoman, ABB, Uni­ver­sal Robots, and KUKA robot­ics, has sev­er­al pick and place mod­els avail­able in our Mar­i­on, Ohio facility. 

These mod­els are able to be pur­chased, as well as cus­tomized in a workcell. 

Cus­tomers have access to our high­ly-skilled staff that can help them through design­ing the per­fect pick-and-place sys­tem for their facility.

For more infor­ma­tion about automat­ing your pick and place appli­ca­tion with Robots​.com, con­tact us today online or at 877−762−6881.