At this year’s Anuga FoodTec, KOCH Industrieanlagen GmbH will be presenting forward-looking robot systems for the food industry featuring handling open products, to packaging, and finishing with pallets all ready for dispatch.

Turnkey one-stop-shopping solutions for all factory areas
With a keen eye for the whole picture, KOCH will be happy to give you every advice and support as the general contractor in planning and implementing individual, complete turnkey systems ranging from filling or primary packaging to palletising and ending with pallets all ready for dispatch.
Compliance with the stringent hygiene standards laid down for the food industry in particular is of the utmost importance. It is with this in mind that the family-run business situated in the Westerwald region not only offers robots designed for the industry’s specific needs but also adapts the peripherals as a whole to the exacting requirements (e.g. stainless steel for the conveyor technology) and also installs its systems in temperature-controlled areas.

Clear focus on Industry 4.0 and digitalisation
One of the leading German producers of coffee specialities also has every confidence in KOCH installing two complete, modular, central palletising systems with over 25 robot palletising cells. The interface set up to the customer’s ERP system is a major step towards Industry 4.0, enabling the customer to continually control and track jobs.
The track and trace technology takes the job data and product quantities from incoming orders and transmits the information via the interfaces to the control system. Further downstream operations include filling, packing, weighing, checking and labelling.

It is especially in the food sector that making sure the packaging is sealed properly and checking filling levels and the temperature of perishable goods are a vital part of quality assurance. These checks are carried out using vision systems, which the company is increasingly combining with its robot systems. Vision systems can detect different dimensions, sizes, shapes, colours, layers and labelling of products.

Robot systems engineered for enhanced ease of use
Moreover, as part of their plans to expand production, one of the largest dairy producers has invested in a fully automatic, high-speed palletising centre for milk trays. The entire system was supplied by KOCH Industrieanlagen and has achieved above all high productivity and palletising quality coupled with flexible layer configurations and patterns thanks to the palletising software KOCH EasyPallet. The system’s palletising cells each have two converging pregrouping lines for milk trays of many different makes where three robots share the tasks for each line. A small, very fast robot which grips and pregroups the trays is installed in each cell per line. The robot is so flexible that it can even create layer patterns with spaces arranged wherever required thanks to KOCH EasyPallet helping to manage the simple and swift stacking patterns. This includes determining the optimum number and arrangement of the boxes and trays on the pallet, creating palletising patterns at a PC and then simply sending the information to the palletising robot.

Have we aroused your interest? Then come and see us at Anuga FoodTec in Cologne from 20-23 March 2018:

Hall 8.1 | Stand C100

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