Innovation has driven Plukon Food Group forward for decades.

For Plukon Food Group, innovation is crucial. As a leading supplier of poultry, meals and salads, among other things, they invest in pioneering technologies to remain successful in the future as well. And this is nothing new for Plukon. In the '90s, this innovative company already had several robots in operation. 

Plukon was one of DERO's first customers and our relationship goes way back. Already before DERO, Maro Dedel, founder of DERO GROEP, came into contact with Plukon. During his time at Landré Robotics, Maro was involved in various robotic projects for Plukon in Wezep. There they delivered refrigerated fresh chicken parts for consumers in the Netherlands and Germany, with short leadtimes of 8 to 24 hours. "We were one of the first in Europe to use robots to automate our order preparation and distribution," says Jaap van de Werfhorst, project manager at Plukon at the time. 

More than progressive

The first project was a robot palletizing installation, consisting of six palletizing robots to place crates on pallets in the correct order and one robot to supply empty pallets. "Stacking crates of products is heavy work and also had to be done in a cold environment of 0°C," explains Jaap. Therefore, an automation solution was needed. Robots were very progressive at the time, but that was not the only reason why Plukon chose robots. Jaap: "We had to maintain reliable production, it could not affect product quality and the service level of delivery to the customer had to be maintained. The customer should not notice anything from the renovation. In addition, the payback time, accessibility of the installation and the ability to continue manually in case of a malfunction were also important. Robots turned out to be the best solution."

Robots (de)palletize crates with chicken products and supply pallets at Plukon in Wezep.

More automation projects followed, including insertion robots that placed trays of chicken products in crates. "These trays were manually removed from crates, weighed and priced out and then placed back in the same crate," Jaap explains. "As many as 60 trays per minute. A monotonous, labor-intensive task. With fast robots, this monotonous operation was automated, which not only increased efficiency but also saved costs." A crate depalletizing robot was also installed to supply chicken products to the order picking area. 

The limited space, many different products and installation while everything else went on as usual made these challenging but great projects.

Long-term cooperation

"Getting to know Jaap van de Werfhorst has been very important for the development of DERO," says Maro. For example, in the early years of DERO, Jaap advocated within Plukon to outsource revision and maintenance work to DERO. "There was a definite connection," Jaap looks back on the cooperation. "DERO thinks along and they can turn difficult issues into relatively simple solutions. In addition, they enjoy taking on a challenge and set the bar high." Now, decades later, Plukon is still a customer of DERO GROEP.

Read more about Plukon here.