Automation’s brighter for Europe’s largest carrot farmer Harvesting 4000 acres of root crops a year – the majority carrots – Prestonbased Huntapac Produce is laying the groundwork to boost its automation packing efficiency. Starting with a customised Brillopak vegetable case loading system. Founded during WWII, family-run carrot farmer, now one of the largest in Europe and supplier to most of the major British supermarkets since 1974 (including Tesco and M&S Food), regards itself as a pioneer. Now, Will Hunter - a robotics advocate since the age of 16 and fourth-generation operations director - is leading a new mission to introduce the best quality control, process and packaging technology to boost productivity, with the fastest ROI. Having explored numerous robotic pick and place options over the last decade, an innovative mechanical case loading system designed by Brillopak is delivering against Will’s exacting criteria. With an estimated ROI of 2.5-years, Huntapac tasked Brillopak to engineer an affordable, compact bespoke tray packing system to accumulate and present carrot packs into neat layer formations in retail-
Huntapac’s merging system and bag flippers ensures that each carrot pack is horizontally aligned before being fed into the Brillopak case packing machine.
Operating 16 hours a day, five days a week, 1200 tons of carrots are graded, washed, polished, cooled, optically graded by size and quality, packed and checkweighed.
FIELD TO YIELD IMPROVEMENTS Presenting up to 80 carrot packs per minute into retail trays, Huntapac replaced one of its traditional rotary table, manual crate packing lines with the automated system earlier this year. Operating 16 hours a day, five days a week, 1200 tons of carrots are graded, washed, polished, cooled, optically graded by size and quality, packed and checkweighed. Once loaded into the
ready crates.
Having spent several decades working
Will Hunter explains: “There’s an
customers to successfully overcome
accepted truth within the farming
packing automation and quality control
community that automation can
issues of this nature, Brillopak was the
address labour shortages and improve
right firm for the job. The company’s
how packs are presented into retail
specially-adapted BR2 vegetable packing
Previously reliant on manual labour to
trays. Despite this, it can be hard for
machine allows Huntapac to run different
maintain a constant case-loading pace,
many to justify a seven-year ROI on
sized and weighted carrot packs, from
now a disparate, unconnected bagging
traditional pick and place robots.” An
500 grams to 1.5 kilograms, smaller
and checkweighing system has been fully
accumulation system based upon
Chantenay carrots, and even parsnips,
integrated into the BR2 case packing
Brillopak’s PunnetPAKer design with an
as well as different packaging materials
system. “By uniting all the electronics up
innovative retractable overhead push
including new recyclable substrates.
the line, the machines all communicate
and slide mechanism more than halved
All without incurring time delays by
with each other via a common control
the ROI and answered this conundrum.
switching robot end effectors.
platform installed by Brillopak.
30 FDPP - www.fdpp.co.uk
with industry leaders and fresh produce
cases, the carrots are then transported to a cold store, ensuring the vegetables stay fresh and maintain their high quality before distribution across the country to fill the supermarket shelves.
