Industries: Food

>SAS< EOAT for Food Industry

Depanners for fresh baked goods, both Needle and Vacuum styles, are designed to handle fragile products right from the baking pan. In addition to depanning, SAS’s depanners can also compress the spacing of the product and place it on conveyors or in trays, tubs or clamshell containers. Downstream operations for case packing and palletizing can be accomplished with the wide range of palletizing tools from SAS Automation.

Read white paper on EOAT for Food Handling by John Westbeld, Engineering Manager for >SAS< Automation.

Applications
Muffin, Cupcake, Brownie and Layer Cake Depanning Design flexibility to handle different shapes/sizes depending on the customer’s needs. Welded frames of stainless steel, anodized or white aluminum support the system of stroking cylinders, rails and bushings that mount the needle grippers or vacuum cups. In one application, stainless steel needle grippers depanned 144 muffins from moving baking pans at the rate of 9 picks and 1,296 muffins per minute, 77,760 per hour and 1.4 million muffins per day. The Needle Depanner compressed the muffin spacing in 2 directions for direct deposit into retail and wholesale trays Ideal for high-volume, continuous commercial operations
Potato Bag Handling Adjustable bag gripper (ABG-25 & ABG-50) for handling and palletizing plastic, woven cloth or paper bags. Eliminates the need for costly, custom tooling with its unique width adjustment system. In less than 30 seconds, the tool’s bag width can be changed from 191-533 mm (7.5 to 21 inches). Independent decking plates align the bag for precise placement on the pallet while the top mounted bag clamps maintain bag position on the Bag Gripper during robot travel to the pallet. Slip sheet and pallet hook options are available.
Produce Box Handling Powered by vacuum turbine or venturi generators for superior grip using high flow vacuum. Valved vacuum ports automatically close when not covered by product or gaps between cartons during multiple picks. Vacuum plates can be zoned for multiple picks and placements and will handle slip sheets and pallets with no additional equipment required.
Frozen Pizza Handling Vacuum gripping was used to provide the needed speed to pick 60 pizza breads per minute. Pizzas conveyed from a freezer were packaged by a flow-pack machine before presenting to the case packing cell. The EOAT compressed the spacing of multiple pizza breads for packing in cases. The vacuum case packer handled several different shapes and sizes of pizzas. Pick rates exceeded 120 items per minute. EOAT was a food grade design with no painted surfaces and could be completely washed with low-pressure water and detergents.