Robotics in Food Manufacturing: Benefits and challenges

Food manufacturing has evolved into intricate processes encompassing preparation, cooking, sorting, packaging, and palletizing. Industrial robots are progressively being incorporated to enhance efficiency, space utilization, cleanliness, and safety.

Food manufacturing robots are commonly used in the dispensing, feed placement, cutting, packaging or casing of food, pick-and-placing products into containers, and sorting. Newer developments also allow for order picking, where an employee or customer is able to place an order electronically, and the food robot automatically fills that specific order. For the packaging of food items, where speed, consistency or high levels of repetition are concerned, the food robots almost always win over humans in terms of efficiency. Robots are equipped with intelligent vision systems allowing the very specific placement of products on a belt to be done with incredible accuracy. Vision system robots are also utilized in sorting by color, shape or size.

Robotic integration has revolutionized manufacturing across industries, boosting efficiency and product uniformity. In the food sector, adopting robotics and automation holds potential for heightened safety, quality, and profitability by optimizing process oversight and control. Despite this trend in various sectors, food manufacturing remained an exception until recently. The intricate variations in consistency and shape inherent to food products posed formidable challenges to automation. The world of robotics is currently facing another breakthrough; small, lightweight, comfortable and above all, flexible - that’s how engineers envisage the industrial lightweight robots of the future. The greatest revolution, however, will be the direct cooperation between man and machine - without a separating safety fence. In the future, these “steel colleagues” of the food industry will be able to do more complex tasks than is the case today.