How To Automate Your Line In A High-Care Environment

Introducing robotic pick and place into a high-care area can put new equipment close to exposed food, including products prepared in high-care ready-meal environments. Alongside reliable handling, therefore, the food handling robot design needs to accommodate controlled product and tray transfers, effective cleaning and a dependable return to production. These requirements affect details as small as a cable route and as significant as where the tray denester sits. Effective high-care automation therefore combines reliable product handling with equipment designed specifically for efficient cleaning and restart.

Make your food-contact equipment easy to clean

Let’s use our Brillopak UniPAKer as an example. This robotic pick and place system can be configured to pick and place unpackaged ready-meal products in high-care environments. Where the gripping head comes into direct contact with food, its materials and design suit the product and the cleaning regime used on site. Brillopak designs application-specific end effectors to handle products reliably, while the required hygienic specification must be agreed for each installation.

A fixing recessed into the head, for example, creates a place where food residue can collect. Making that area accessible, or allowing the head to be removed for cleaning, gives your hygiene team a way to reach it. Surfaces above the product deserve the same attention too, as condensation or residues on a poorly positioned bracket can reach an open tray. This influences the positioning of the robot and its supporting structure.

The British Standard BS EN 1672-2:2020 covers hygiene and cleanability in food-processing machinery. Its principles extend beyond the obvious food-contact surfaces to the machinery that surrounds them. In systems destined for high care environments, the specification therefore has to include the suitability of joints, seals and supporting surfaces for the intended cleaning process.

Reduce manual handling around exposed food

One of the advantages of robotic pick and place in high-care production is the opportunity to reduce the amount of manual handling around exposed food. Instead of operators repeatedly transferring products into trays, the robot performs those movements automatically, allowing your team to concentrate on ‘hands-off’ replenishment, supervision and quality checks.

Automated tray denesting can support the same approach, so rather than positioning individual trays by hand, operators can replenish the stacks at designated points while the machinery separates and presents each tray for filling. This allows clean trays to enter the packing process through your established hygiene controls, while reducing the need for operators to work directly around the exposed product.

Together, these operations reduce the need for people to work continuously at the packing point. When specifying a system, assess how the robot and tray denester will connect with existing equipment and whether the end effector can handle different products and tray formats with minimal changeover. Trials with the actual products help confirm these requirements before installation.

Make cleaning and restart time part of the design

Of course, the time available for production depends partly on how quickly your team can complete its cleaning procedure and return the equipment to service after each cycle. In practice, preparation and reassembly can take as much planning as cleaning itself: guards must be opened, accessible parts removed where required, and the machine checked before restarting.

As we’ve seen, the way the machinery is built makes a considerable difference here. Equally important is how easily those components go back together. Tooling that returns to its original position without extensive readjustment allows your engineers to complete the restart checks more quickly.

Another consideration is whether the automation can withstand your existing cleaning regime. On a wet-cleaned line, motors, sensors and electrical connectors need suitable protection against water ingress, while exposed materials must tolerate the cleaning chemicals and temperatures involved. Components that require covering or disconnecting before every washdown add work to both ends of the cleaning cycle, so specifying equipment that can remain in place throughout the process helps reduce that repeated preparation work and makes more production time available.

Next steps

Download Brillopak’s free Packing To Perfection guide for practical advice on hygienic robotic pick and place automation, equipment selection and integration into an existing packing line.