Lifting over 10 tons in one shift – easy thanks to the coboworx palletizing solution.

At a glance

Lay Gewürze, a family-owned company based in southern Thuringia, produces spices and spice blends for the craft industry and the general food industry. Its wide range of dry, liquid, and paste-like spice blends is used to enhance various foods. Over 2,000 tons of raw and finished goods are stored in oxygen-reduced warehouses and processed in the company's own spice mills. Lay Gewürze produces exclusively for B2B, which is why containers of up to 25 kilograms are filled. In the case of the automation solution that Lay Gewürze implemented together with coboworx, the containers filled are buckets with a weight of 15.9 kilograms. In the past, these had to be stacked manually on pallets by employees. With a throughput of approximately one ton per hour, this meant that around 8 tons were palletized by hand in an 8-hour shift. Thanks to the automation solution for palletizing, effective added value was created for the employees, which was clearly noticeable from the moment it went into operation.

The Challenge

Of a total of 135 employees, approximately 70 work in production, working in two or three shifts as required. “The challenge in recent years has been to find suitable employees for production who are willing to support the increasingly complex processes and undergo training in accordance with the hygiene requirements of the food industry,” reports Michael Fischer. As operations manager at Lay Gewürze, he is responsible for technology in general and for production in the human resources department. The second major problem was the high physical strain on employees due to the fact that relatively heavy containers are filled in the B2B sector. “Hoisting 8-10 tons manually onto pallets every day – no one can do that for long, and we didn't want to put our employees through that,” says Michael Fischer. That was one of the main reasons why Lay Gewürze opted for the automation solution: primarily to create effective added value for employees and to reduce their physical strain.

The Solution

In May 2022, Michael Fischer began to take a closer look at automation and came across coboworx and the coboworx online configurator while researching online. He entered the relevant data into the configurator and received a response within a few days. “In principle, it took about half a year from the start of the project in mid-May 2022 to commissioning,” recalls Michael Fischer. Commissioning took place during live operation and was “one of the shortest machine commissioning processes” he had ever experienced, reports the plant manager. "We basically produced buckets, placed a pallet next to us so we could continue palletizing by hand, and then added the robot so we could ‘feed’ it at the same time. After the first half pallet of manual palletizing, we stopped and let the robot do the work. It was a very pleasant commissioning because we had already discussed relatively intensively in advance how we should implement the solution."