A (3D) vision for the bakery industry

This is the fourth edition of our JLS “VISION” magazine and will focus on a key segment of our business–bakery. Depending on the year, the bakery segment is our largest revenue segment as well as the highest volume of robots that we deploy. As a result, we felt that it was important to dedicate an issue to the bakery industry.

JLS has been involved with bakery applications for over a dozen years and has provided some of the largest installations of delta robots in North America. Those have mostly been on the primary side of operations, but now with the Peregrine® carton loading and closing system, we are able to address full line automation for baked goods producers. Our Osprey ® case packers are growing in importance as the flexibility of vision guided robotic equipment is more important than ever.

Just like in the meat industry, our focus on hygienic robotic solutions for the bakery industry is more relevant than ever with the enormous challenges that our customers face in finding and retaining a viable labor force. Applications that may not have met yesterday’s ROI requirements are now on the priority list for funding as in many cases, labor shortages are choking output. Additionally, the competitive pressures on the labor pool have driven wages to unthinkable levels, pre-pandemic. Bakeries need to run 24/5 or 24/6 and staffing those lines on second and third shift really causes issues in finding labor.

JLS has provided a number of intriguing solutions for handling bakery products from cupcakes to tortillas to fresh dough. We have several tooling patents and recently received a patent on our Peregrine cartoner for our use of the independent mover technology.

We are excited about where technology is going in a number of areas. We just shipped a new camera system for JLS using a low cost, but powerful 3D camera. We believe that it won’t be long before 3D is our standard as it offers a number of advantages including simpler commissioning on some straightforward applications as well as excellent measurement and inspection tools that were previously deemed too slow or costly for our systems. In addition, the new camera solutions available offer Machine Learning Algorithms that allow us to optimize line efficiencies without human intervention. In a similar manner, our newly released ABA - Adaptive Balancing Algorithmgives JLS an adaptive solution to handling imbalances of product flow created by irregularities in product or flow upstream. ABA automatically compensates for these disturbances to flow and maintains high throughput, but with filled containers or flights leaving the system and with minimal or no product going by.

As more and more of our customers are looking to JLS to provide complete integrated line solutions, we have partnered with a number of flow wrapper companies and carton forming firms to be able to do just that. JLS is the bakery industry’s trusted partner when it comes to solving even the toughest production line problems.

Craig A. Souser, President and CEO