Food and beverage processors are increasingly turning towards robotics for the technology’s slew of benefits including reduced costs, upped throughput and increased food and worker safety. While robotics does boast various benefits to food manufacturing, it’s important to follow some best practices during your own implementation. Here are five things to consider when using robotics in your food manufacturing facility: 1. Ensure your robots have the appropriate grippers — When handling different products, you will need to make sure that you have the appropriate grippers for your product. For example, meats can be greasy and slippery, whereas cookies are rigid and more susceptible to crumbling, and paper sacks of flour or sugar can be dusty. 2. Be mindful of cross-contamination — From a hygienic viewpoint, it is critical to make sure that there isn’t any cross-contamination if there are multiple types of products running on the same robotic cells. If you have one cookie product with nuts and another cookie that doesn’t contain nuts, you need to make sure that you are able to properly clean the grippers between products. 3. Use robots in pairs for pick-in-place robotic systems — That way, if one goes down for maintenance or for some other reason, the line doesn’t need to be shut down.  Another reason is if your line speeds require running one robot at 100 percent capacity, with two systems you will only run the equipment at 50 percent, increasing your robots’ life and reducing required maintenance. 4. Think of the ROI when determining the need for robotic case packing or secondary packing applications — There are a lot of times where the line speed isn’t sufficient to justify a robotic packaging application. It may be more cost effective to have a manual or mechanical packing operation. Every operation is […]