Case packing 1.5 million eggs a day with one arm per line
Fresh egg processing and packaging · Packaging or case packing · Vendor published
This account comes from a robot maker, integrator, or their marketing partner. Treat every performance and payback figure as advertising until an engineer verifies it against your own job.
The job
Cascina Italia, an Italian egg company, packs cartons of eggs into large corrugated cases for supermarket distribution. Workers used to build these bulky cases by hand at line output stations; a cobot now picks tray loads of egg cartons and loads cases layer by layer, in a plant with 24 packing line output stations.
The shop
50 to 100 employees per the vendor case story.
The equipment
Universal Robots UR5 with a pneumatic gripper for lifting trays of egg cartons, integrated by Italian distributor Alumotion; installed directly on the line without guarding.
The published numbers
Payload: not published. Rate: the robot station handles about 1.5 million eggs per day, published-by-vendor and repeated by trade press; trade press reports case packing at 15,000 eggs per hour with cases built up to nine layers, reported-by-trade-press; each case holds 144 cartons of 10 eggs, published-by-vendor. Cost: not published. Payback: 365 days, a vendor claim.
Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.
What we would check before believing it applies to you
Food handling at this pace worked because the robot picks whole trays rather than individual fragile items, a pattern worth copying: automate at the unit load level where the product is already stabilized. The fenceless install on a crowded line is attractive for space starved plants, but it depends on a risk assessment that accounts for people leaning into the pick zone all shift. A similar plant should verify tray consistency, since a pneumatic tray gripper tolerates far less variation than the marketing suggests, and eggs punish drops publicly. Check the takt honestly: 15,000 eggs per hour is a trade press headline for this cell, and your carton formats, case sizes, and layer counts will move that number. The one year payback is the vendor's claim, so rebuild it from your own labor and breakage data.
Sources
Is your job like this one?
Tell Joe what you are running. He will give you a straight preliminary read, and he will tell you if a robot is the wrong answer for your situation.
Read the packaging and case packing guide