Candy Packaging

The Challenge

Customer: Candy Manufacturer.

The product is a rectangular candy delivered via two lanes of conveyor from two separate candy making/wrapping machines. They are packed into 12 and 18 count cartons.

The existing operation was extremely labor intensive, and often the count in the carton was incorrect and rejected at the check weigh station, requiring re-packing. The existing process emptied the two lanes onto large tables, where the cartons were manually assembled and filled, then put onto a check-weigh device and fed into a carton wrapper. The customer needed to replace a manual carton making and packing operation with an automated unit. The automated solution required handling two lanes of the product at a combined rate of 140 parts per minute, while being unaffected by unbalanced delivery between the two lanes.

Why Choose MiQ?

MiQ was selected due to its expertise in system integration, automation and program management capabilities.

Our Solution

The design MiQ supplied was a robotic packaging module with two lanes of infeed and an integrated carton forming machine. The candy entered on one end of the module in two lanes, while the carton was formed, glued, and entered from the other end. The candy bars were lined up in rows, picked up by the robot end effector, which placed them in the carton. The carton then continued out of the module into the check weigh and wrapping operations. The module performed at rate, and would have been capable of much higher rate of operation if the candy could have been made faster.