The international bakery group Poppies Bakeries produces enormous quantities of sweet bakery products every day. At its Melissant site, no fewer than 190.000 profiteroles roll off the production line every hour. Behind these delicacies lies an extremely robust and well-designed automated packing and palletizing process, powered by robots that are more than thirty years old. 

In 2005, when the company was still called Culi d'Or, DERO installed three compact and versatile robot systems here for palletizing boxes of profiteroles. These are the same robots that are still in operation today and have now spanned generations.

For Anthony Vijfhuizen, site manager since 2022, they are a familiar sight. He grew up among the machines. "I used to help out in the company when I was younger," he says. "The robots were already there back then." And that’s no coincidence. His father Broer, former head of technical services at Poppies Bakeries, was closely involved in the arrival of the robots in 2005 and knows the installations inside out.

At the time, automation was not an obvious step. "There was quite a bit of resistance in the beginning," says Broer. "When you automate, it has to remain simple. If something goes wrong, I want you to be able to go to your neighbor, so to speak, to have it repaired."

Simplicity as a starting point

From the very first meeting, DERO actively thought along with Poppies Bakeries, which instilled confidence in the collaboration. Maro Dedel, CEO and founder of DERO GROEP: "We deliberately opted for a compact and robust robot setup with multifunctional features. The robots not only palletize the boxes, but also handle the empty pallets and interlayers. One gripper does it all. The solution is simple in design but technically sophisticated: twenty different pallet patterns and multiple box sizes, brought together in one straightforward cell without unnecessary complexity."

The more than thirty-year-old robots are still doing their job at Poppies Bakeries in Melissant.

By using second-hand robots, a sustainable, customized solution could be achieved within a limited budget. "The second-hand GMF/FANUC S-420 robots were previously used in the automotive industry and were given a new lease of life in Melissant after the Opel factory closed," says Maro.

A constant factor

Originally built in 1992, the robots at Poppies Bakeries are now among the oldest FANUC robots still in operation that DERO GROEP has ever installed. "What we have here has been doing exactly what it was designed to do for twenty years," says Broer with a touch of understatement. Because it has not been made more complicated than necessary, it still works after all these years. A fine example of how the power of a good solution sometimes lies simply in its simplicity.

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