Automated sorting, inspection, and packaging of baked goods for retail

Automated sorting and packaging case study for bakery

Challenge

Our customer produces baked goods for the retail industry and required an automated food packaging machine that would handle a demanding workload quickly and with efficiency.

Invention

Together with our customer, the Sewtec engineering team designed and developed a solution to accommodate hundreds of products on a packing line ready for sorting, quality control, and primary packaging, utilising our high-speed pick and place robots and a third-party flow wrapping machine.

Products arrive from the upstream production area at 400 parts per minute (PPM). The Sewtec food packaging system separates the goods into product streams and, using 3D scanning technology, runs a quality control process across each product, with rejected items – based on pre-programmed criteria – returned to an inspection point at the end of the belt.

Results

The automated packaging machine is able to take products from upstream production at 400 PPM, separate and inspect them before its pick and place robots collate and stack the correct number of products on the flow wrapping machine at 100PPM. At this point, they are ready for primary packaging.