What changed when they automated
What changed when an egg plant case packed 1.5 million eggs a day with one cobot per line
Cascina Italia packs egg cartons into large corrugated cases for supermarkets. Workers built the bulky cases by hand at the line output stations. A UR5 with a pneumatic tray gripper now loads cases layer by layer, handling about 1.5 million eggs a day per the vendor, with a one year payback the vendor claims.
The short answer
A 50 to 100 person egg company put one collaborative arm on a line output station to pick tray loads of egg cartons and build cases up to nine layers, installed directly on the line without guarding. The vendor publishes about 1.5 million eggs a day through the station and claims a payback of 365 days. The account below is the maker's own case story, so read every number as the vendor published it, not as an audited result.
What the job looked like before
Egg cartons came off 24 packing line output stations and workers built large corrugated cases by hand, lifting trays of cartons into cases layer by layer, all shift, in a plant that handles a fragile product at supermarket volumes.
What they put in
A Universal Robots UR5 with a pneumatic gripper designed to lift whole trays of egg cartons, integrated by the Italian distributor Alumotion and installed on the line with no guarding, which depends on a risk assessment for people working beside it.
What changed, in their numbers
About 1.5 million eggs per day through the robot station, published by the vendor and repeated by trade press. Trade press reports case packing at 15,000 eggs per hour with cases built up to nine layers. Each case holds 144 cartons of 10 eggs, published by the vendor. Payback of 365 days, a vendor claim. Cost was not published.
What this does not tell you
It does not publish the cell cost, so the one year payback is the vendor's. It does not publish breakage, which is the number an egg plant would want. The fenceless installation on a crowded line depends on a risk assessment that accounts for people leaning into the pick zone, and that assessment is not described. And a pneumatic tray gripper tolerates far less tray variation than a case story suggests.
What to verify in your own plant
Tray and carton consistency across every SKU you run, because the gripper is the weak point. Your real takt at peak, since 15,000 eggs an hour is a headline for this cell and your formats will move it. The layer counts and case sizes you change between. And your own labor and breakage data, from which to rebuild the payback.
Sources: https://www.universal-robots.com/case-stories/cascina/ and https://www.packworld.com/secondary-packaging/article/13365727/lightweight-robot-arms-casepack-eggs-at-15000hr
Describe your packing station to Joe, the concierge on this site, if you want a read on whether a tray level pick fits your line. It is free, and the first question will be how the product arrives.
Related on this site
- Packaging and case packing
- Case erecting and packing
- What a walkthrough with Joe looks like: a packaging line nobody thought was automatable
- Robots for food and beverage plants
- The casebook of published deployments
Automate at the unit load the product is already stabilized in. The robot picks whole trays, never individual eggs, and that is the transferable idea.
Put it to the test on your own job
Tell Joe what you are running and he will apply this to your numbers, including telling you when a robot is the wrong answer.
More notes