Robot Takes Care Of Tattie Trays At QV Foods

Blu-Robot by PacepackerIt also eliminated a health and safety risk factor on two of its potato packing lines.

With four sites across the UK, QV Foods is a grower and packer of potatoes and vegetables, supplying the retail and food service trades with both fresh and prepared produce. Its potatoes, which range from premium salad potatoes to King Edward, Maris Piper and baking potatoes, are sold under brands including Potato Lovers, Baby Pearls, Chippie’s Choice, Bakers Banquet, and Gregg Wallace’s Fresh Approach to Produce. The company counts M&S, Aldi, Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s among its customers.

The firm’s Holbeach Hurn factory in Spalding, Lincolnshire, operates five potato bagging lines, two of which are now served by a pre-owned six-axis Fanuc S420 Blu-Robot. On both lines, potatoes are packed into 1 and 2.5kg bags at speeds of 55 bags per minute on a Newtec bagging machine and deposited onto a conveyor, which transports them to either a mechanical case packer or a manual packing station for packing into 60x40cm plastic trays. Full trays are conveyed downstream into the robot cell, where they are picked and placed onto pallets, in stacks nine layers high.

“We provided QV Foods with a dual stacking position, so that the robot can stack trays from each production line on to its relevant pallet,” explains Paul Wilkinson, Business Development Manager at Pacepacker Services. “This is an extremely time-efficient configuration as the robot is always in use covering two production lines and trays are accumulated in the system while a full pallet is being changed for an empty one.”

Not only does the robot palletise trays from two lines simultaneously, it also positions the trays in two different stacking sequences simultaneously.

“Different customers have different requirements in terms of the types of pallets they want,” explains Steve Bell, general manager of QV Foods’ Holbeach Hurn site, where bagged potatoes are destined for the multiple retailers. “On one line, the stacking arrangement is four per layer on a euro pallet, whereas on the other line, a five-per-layer pattern best fits the GKN pallets favoured by that customer.”

The design of the Blu-Robot’s end-effector was key to achieving the more challenging five-per-layer configuration; independent gripper fingers enable one, two or three trays to be lifted at the same time whilst there is also a detection system to aid identification of broken or open bail arms.

Price also played an important part in QV Foods’ decision to buy the Blu-Robot. The second user palletisers are re-conditioned robots that originate primarily from the automotive industry. The robots are typically half the cost of a new system despite being only approximately a third of the way through their 100,000 operational hour lifespan.

Prior to the purchase of the Blu-Robot, palletisation was a manual operation. “We were able to do it manually, but there was a health and safety risk. Some trays contain 16kg of potatoes and if someone is having to lift those all day, that gets tiring,” says Steve Bell.

Automation has eliminated that risk factor, and allowed QV Foods to reduce manning levels on the two packing lines. The lines are in operation 20 hours per day, seven days a week, and now require three rather than four operators. As a result of these labour savings, the robot, which was commissioned in February 2012, is expected to pay for itself within two years of purchase.

QV Foods is now planning to automate the one remaining manual case packing operation, and once it does this, Bell says the payback rate will be accelerated, as currently, the robot is only set to perform at 85 per cent of its speed capacity.

So impressed is the company with the reliability and performance of the Blu-Robot that it is looking to invest in a second system to serve two more of the five packing lines.

“The Blu-Robot has been an extremely reliable piece of machinery,” says Steve Bell. “Since we’ve had it we’ve not had to replace any parts. I was initially dubious about the rubber band drives on the roller systems, but am happy to have been proved wrong; we’ve not had any issues with centres of infeed.”