Automation ’ s brighter for Europe ’ s largest carrot farmer
Harvesting 4000 acres of root crops a year – the majority carrots – Prestonbased Huntapac Produce is laying the groundwork to boost its automation packing efficien-cy . Starting with a customised Brillopak vegetable case loading system .
Founded during WWII , family-run carrot farmer , now one of the largest in Europe and supplier to most of the major British supermarkets since 1974 ( including Tesco and M & S Food ), regards itself as a pioneer . Now , Will Hunter - a robotics advocate since the age of 16 and fourth-generation operations director - is leading a new mission to introduce the best quality control , process and packaging technology to boost productivity , with the fastest ROI .
Having explored numerous robotic pick and place options over the last decade , an inno-vative mechanical case loading system designed by Brillopak is delivering against Will ’ s exacting criteria . With an estimated ROI of 2.5-years , Huntapac tasked Brillopak to engi-neer an affordable , compact bespoke tray packing system to accumulate and present carrot packs into neat layer formations in retail-ready crates .
Will Hunter explains : “ There ’ s an accepted truth within the farming community that auto-mation can address labour shortages and improve how packs are presented into retail trays . Despite this , it can be hard for many to justify a seven-year ROI on traditional pick and place robots .” An accumulation system based upon Brillopak ’ s PunnetPAKer design with an innovative retractable overhead push and slide mechanism more than halved the ROI and answered this conundrum .
Having spent several decades working 38 FDPP - www . fdpp . co . uk with industry leaders and fresh produce customers to successfully overcome packing automation and quality control issues of this nature , Brillopak was the right firm for the job . The company ’ s specially-adapted BR2 vegetable packing machine allows Huntapac to run different sized and weighted carrot packs , from 500 grams to 1.5 kilograms , smaller Chantenay carrots , and even parsnips , as well as dif-ferent packaging materials including new recyclable substrates . All without incurring time delays by switching robot end effectors .
FIELD TO YIELD IMPROVEMENTS
Presenting up to 80 carrot packs per minute into retail trays , Huntapac replaced one of its traditional rotary table , manual crate packing lines with the automated system earlier this year . Operating 16 hours a day , five days a week , 1200 tons of carrots are graded , washed , polished , cooled , optically graded by size and quality , packed and checkweighed . Once loaded into the cases , the carrots are then transported to a cold store , ensuring the vegetables stay fresh and maintain their high quality before distribu-tion across the country to fill the supermarket shelves .
Previously reliant on manual labour to maintain a constant case-loading pace , now a dis-parate , unconnected bagging and checkweighing system has been fully integrated into the BR2 case packing system . “ By uniting all the electronics up the line , the machines all communicate with each other via a common control platform installed by Brillopak . This helps to pre-empt bottlenecks , address production lags and respond instantly if packs get trapped . Should any of these events occur , the upstream packing and checkweighing machines slow or stop automatically until all the processes are