Cobot palletizing at a family wine bottler
Contract wine bottling and shipping · Palletizing · 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
Raumland GmbH in Germany filters, labels, bottles, and ships wine for many producers, handling more than five million bottles across roughly 2,500 different wines a year. At the end of the bottling line, workers stacked filled cartons onto pallets by hand, moving up to 40 tons of package weight in a single 8 hour shift. Constantly changing carton formats had made conventional fixed automation a poor fit.
The shop
10 to 25 employees per the vendor case story; third generation family owned.
The equipment
Universal Robots UR20 cobot running as part of the Robotiq PE20 palletizing solution, with a wide vacuum gripper that picks two wine cartons at a time; two pallet positions so an employee swaps a full pallet while the robot keeps stacking the other.
The published numbers
Payload: not published. Rate: not published; the pick mechanism (two cartons per cycle) is published-by-vendor. Volume context: more than 5 million bottles and about 2,500 wines per year, and up to 40 tons hand stacked per 8 hour shift before automation, all published-by-vendor. Cost: not published. Payback: not published.
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
This deployment worked because it was chosen for format flexibility rather than speed: one arm, a forgiving vacuum tool, and a dual pallet layout that absorbs pallet changes without stopping the line. A shop with similar variety should verify that its carton stock is stiff and sealed enough for vacuum picking, since vented, flimsy, or dusty cartons are the usual failure point. Confirm the double pick actually holds across your lightest and heaviest SKUs, and measure whether one arm keeps pace with your line, because no cycle rate was published here. Check floor space and forklift routes around a two pallet cell, and budget for the collaborative risk assessment; fenceless does not mean assessment free.
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 palletizing guide