Rg Luma specialise in bespoke pick, pack and palletise applications within the food and beverage sector.
High Volume, Many Products, Same day delivery – Food Production requires fast, flexible and reliable automation. Rg Luma provides the solutions …
We are all used to being able to walk into our local supermarkets any day of the week and being able to buy any of the multitude of choices that they offer. To ensure that a constant supply of these products are available to us, food manufacturers turn to automation and to RG Luma. We engineer solutions that can pick product from the production lines at whatever speeds you require, can change between products in seconds and can run for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. From your morning pancakes to your evening barbecue dips, RG Luma automates production lines to keep the supermarket shelves stacked.
Traditionally Food production, and especially packing, has used people to maintain the required flexibility and speed of response to changes that the supermarkets demand. Rg Luma’s solutions within the food factories take this into account and are often based around robotics which are flexible enough to cater for many variants and allow change over times between those variants in seconds meaning that supermarket demands can be met every day.
Innovative solutions using cutting edge technology is how we deliver results to our customers … how can we help you?
Yoghurt Production expands with Rg Luma's automation
Rachel’s Organic yoghurts are now a familiar premium brand on many supermarket shelves, in part, thanks to the automation that RG Luma provided that enabled them to expand their production facility from a restrictive manual process on one filling line to fully automated packing and palletising throughout their dairy.
Our challenge was to take pots (from 350g to 600g) direct from their fillers, check weigh and metal detect them to meet national food standards and then place them in to acetate trays at a rate of 120 pots per minute per line. When they were packed into trays we supplied a robotic solution to palletise the product ready for distribution to their customers.
Our solution had to be installed in the floor space of their existing dairy and involved integrating Sparc Systems check weigh/metal detectors, bespoke conveying, purpose built multihead pick and place servo systems and ABB robotic palletising robots. The solution was built with hygeinic wash down in mind and installed over weekends to ensure that there was no interruption to supply to their customers.
Data collection for weights and measures regulations was included and the result was that their production was able to expand to keep pace with their sales requirements without incurring any further high labour costs.
Over a thousand crumpets a minute - our solution delivers
RG Luma had already installed robotic pancake stacking lines at Honeytop foods which were so successful that it allowed them to open new product markets to their customers. They decided to invest in crumpet production and required a solution that could pick and stack over a 1000 crumpets a minute in a variety of stack patterns for the multitude of customers that they were offering them to.
Using proven RG Luma and ABB flex picker technology was the obvious way forward and so we provided a flexible line with touch screen change over that included 12 robots utilising vision technology to pick individual crumpets and place them in a stack height determined by the particular customer packing format selected on each run.
An additional requirement was to recognise the crumpets’ top surface so that they could be packed face to face and back to back to maximise shelf visualisation. RG Luma developed algorithms to achieve this using the standard ABB “Pickmaster” software.
Stacks were then conveyed to Fuji Flow wrappers for final packaging before delivery to supermarket shelves.
Honeytop’s investment in RG Luma’s line was again a huge success and resulted in them being able to supply around 1200 crumpets a minute to their customers with no dedicated packing operators.