The Aviateur is a very modern cake producer. This large-scale pastry bakery with a progressive mentality supplies cookies and pastries to all supermarkets in the Netherlands and exports to more than 20 countries. Fully automatic baking and packing lines have been running for years at the headquarters in Broek op Langedijk.

The Driehoek location in Alkmaar - which specializes in cake products - also had a fully automatic baking line already, but packaging was still largely done by hand. To save on labor costs, Aviateur decided to invest in an automatic packing department.

Smart technology

The entire department was redesigned, which included the installation of three robotic cells from DERO. Two cells place flow-wrapped cakes in trays and the third takes care of packing various products in outer boxes. "It used to take six people to pack the cakes," says Ronald Komen, manager of several Aviateur locations. "Now two robots are all we need." That sounds simple, but behind this is quite a bit of clever engineering.

Flexible robot cells

The robots in the two insert cells pick up the cakes 'in flight' from a running conveyor belt using line tracking. The infeed system was designed specifically for this application. By picking up nine cakes simultaneously, a capacity of 325 cakes per minute can be achieved.

The packing cell also picks up multiple products simultaneously, to process up to 150 products per minute. By using a robot, a flexible, compact and reliable packing cell is obtained. "What particularly appeals to me is the robustness and simplicity of the system," says Ronald. "Especially in a bakery, this is a necessity."

Brilliant simplicity

Various grippers were made for the different sizes of products and boxes, which can be exchanged within 5 minutes using a manually operated exchange system. Ronald: "I am particularly charmed by the brilliant simplicity of the robotic cell. Conversion is child's play. Change the gripper, three things on the conveyor belt and that's it. We also have packing robots at another location, but they require quite a lot of conversion work as soon as they switch to a different product. That easily takes half an hour and then the whole line is down. I believe simplicity is always best."

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