Allinson flour millers fully automate bagged flour palletising

Following a lengthy tender process, Allinson (Silverspoon), flour millers in Bishops Stortford, part of Associated British Foods plc, along with their consultants, Lorien Engineering, chose Greenstone Conveyor Systems Ltd (GCS) to provide them with a fully automatic end of the line robotic palletising system.

The system collects bagged flour from four packaging machines, queues them on accumulating conveyors, prior to palletising, by twin Fanuc pick and place robots. Pallets are fed into the system from a pallet dispenser, via a space saving trolley car system that feeds them under the outfeed bag accumulating conveyors. Fully loaded pallets are automatically transferred via pallet conveyor to a pallet stretch wrapping machine. Once stretch wrapped the pallets are off loaded by FLT and removed for storage.

As bags of flour can vary in height, dependant on the type and time of year it is milled, the robot’s gripper is fitted with a sensing mechanism which automatically adjusts the constructed pallet height. Robot movements are kept to the minimum by the collation of a complete row of bagged flour, presented to the robot in the correct orientation for palletising.

The system runs five days a week across three shifts, handling up to 600 tons of flour. Allinson (Silverspoon) numbers most major supermarket chains, Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Summerfield and Waitrose amongst it’s customers along with many national wholesalers and the NHS.

Andy Jones, Allinson’s Site Manager at Bishops Stortford chose Greenstone Conveyor Systems Ltd (GCS) for their unique solution to the palletising project which saved 75 square metres of valuable warehouse space with an overall project cost well inline with their budget.