Page 42 - Packaging News magazine March_April 2023

ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION
Sweet system: packaging for artisan confectionery
Multi-variable packaging lines can be hard work to design, develop and eventually control, but Cama says its domain experience and high-tech solutions are more than up to the task.
NAKED CHOCOLATE PRODUCTS, three shapes, 15 packaging counts, 14 packaging formats, five SKU styles and 1500
ppm throughput. Just two of these vari- ables are enough to put most packaging companies off, but when you’re Cama Group, these six are all in a day’s work.
Hawaiian Host is a North American con- fectionery company, which was started nearly 100 years ago in the founder’s parents’ attic on the island of Maui. The company claims it is the original maker and the world’s largest manufacturer of chocolate-covered Macadamia nuts.
A LOCAL SOUVENIR
The products are all associated with the Japanese word ‘omiyage’, which means a local souvenir gifted to friends and family, the company says. As such, the packaging has to reflect and support this meaning and intention in its design.
“We first met the company five years ago at PackExpo,” explains Alessandro Rocca, group sales director at Cama Group. “They came onto our booth, holding a tray of chocolates and asked: ‘Do you have a robot that can pack this?’ After significant design work and cus- tomer liaison, we won the order for a huge line, which would see over 1500 chocolates per minute being packed precisely, positively and delicately in an array of different packaging formats.”
SPECIALISED TURNKEY LINE
According to Cama, the turnkey line it developed is highly specialised and is designed specifically to handle the demands of this particular packaging exercise. In operation, robots equipped with Gimatic grippers are used to pick naked chocolates from feed rows on a conveyor and then gently place them into PET trays that arrive in parallel from a de-nester. The chocolates’ qual- ity, shape and position on the belt are determined using a special 3D laser scanner supplied by Univision.
Once each tray is full, they are loaded singly or in pairs (with a cushion sheet) into carton trays, before a
lid is formed and tucked into
the tray, the finished product being a completed box con- taining anything from four to 32 chocolates. The boxes are then fed through an x-ray
Never stop the line unnecessarily and be as efficient as possible when it is running.
ALESSANDRO ROCCA, CAMA GROUP
Above: This line benefits from Cama’s full Industry 4.0 offering and is one of the first to deploy its new AI-driven line supervisor software.
Below: Over 1500 chocolates per minute are packed precisely, positively and delicately in an array of different packaging formats.
machine and check weigher before heading to a case packer at the end of the line.
Cama says that the line is also capa- ble of bulk packaging, which is also used as a fall back in case of any line issues. In this instance, carton sheets can be fed through the line and the delta robots can directly load choco- lates into the carton, which are then passed onto a manual loading sec- tion requested by the customer. This approach prevents any significant downtime, according to the company.
42 ❙ MARCH – APRIL 2023
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