Go for the Mozart Balls
The confectionery manufacturer Reber is banking on flexible pick and place robots from Schubert.
Noble confectionery like the “Echte Reber Mozart-Kugeln” deserve an equally noble wrapping. For many years, the traditional company Reber has relied on packaging machines by Schubert for this purpose. In order to package the fine specialties even more efficiently in their diverse boxes in the future, two new TLM packaging machines with pick and place robots have now been integrated into production. The two machines increase packaging output by around 30 percent, explains machine manufacturer Schubert.
Half a million Mozart balls leave the Bad Reichenhall plant every day. The company turned to Schubert again as part of an extensive production optimization program to integrate a high-performance packaging line into its processes. The new line was to be able to cover all current and upcoming market trends for at least ten years, while ensuring high machine availability and fail-safe operation. At the same time, the manufacturer wanted to retain its previous high-quality packaging of Mozart balls, which consisted of many individual parts, reports Schubert. The machine manufacturer solved this requirement through its modular machine concept with an individual, extremely flexible system consisting of two packaging machines – one for primary packaging and one for secondary packaging.
For primary packaging, the combination of a picker line and a packing line was designed. If single-sort formats are to be packed, the picker line operates. If, on the other hand, mixed boxes are to be packed, the side feed belts are used, and the line is switched to packing line operation. For secondary packaging, i. e. the praline boxes, Reber uses a Schubert cartoner. It stands as a separate system in production but connects directly to the upstream pick and place machine by Schubert. Depending on the format, the filled trays either run into the new cartoner or to existing machine equipment. The separate systems, which can be integrated into the production as a whole in various ways, mean that the overall availability of the packaging solution is particularly high, the company says. “Because this way, Reber can not only process the current product range fully automatically and reliably, but also common special formats such as Christmas editions or all future products and formats,” a spokesperson says.
