Flowpacker and TLM-Cartoner Nutrition

Requirements

Clean eating challenges production capacities

The area surrounding Toulouse is known throughout France for its hearty specialities. You wouldn’t expect to find the headquarters of a leading manufacturer of health-conscious, dietary foods there. In fact, Nutrition & Santé in Revel has been one of the pioneers in the field since 1972. Today, the company’s portfolio covers an extensive assortment – from gluten-and lactose-free products to sports nutrition and foods with reduced sugar content.

With its focus on ‘free-from’ products, Nutrition & Santé has tapped into the tastes of our times on several levels, as the trend towards health-conscious nutrition continues to have a strong impact on the food sector. Consumers are now increasingly asking for healthy, high-quality foods with clean ingredients –a development that manufacturers can only keep pace with by ensuring top production capacity and advanced machine technologies.

The company faced a double challenge at its Revel plant. On the one hand, Nutrition & Santé needed significantly more output, but on the other, it was unwilling to compromise on flexibility. The number of product formats produced in France is simply too high.

Solution

A partnership based on trust for 25 years

It was no surprise that Nutrition & Santé turned to Schubert with this challenge. The two companies have been working together for 25 years – long enough to have collaborated on many successful projects. The initial spark for the renewed collaboration came at interpack 2023, where Schubert presented the TLM Comfort Feeder and A6 erector, an entirely new, efficient and resource-saving concept for feeding pre-cut cardboard blanks.

The French team saw this as an opportunity to achieve its own production targets and invited Schubert to submit a proposal. Schubert’s machine concept was so impressive that Nutrition placed an order for two new packaging lines in December of the same year – a Flowpacker and a cartoner with two A3 erectors.

With great success: The new line – combining a Flowpacker and a cartoner – boosts production speed, enhances flexibility, and cuts down on material consumption.

The flow-wrapped cookies lie neatly in a box.

The new packaging line not only delivers the performance boost we urgently needed in production, but will also save us packaging material in the future. At the same time, the machine concept offers us sufficient flexibility to implement future formats and grouping schemes. We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect solution.

Pierre-Louis Nicolau-Guillaumet

Project Manager at Nutrition & Santé

Technical Details

Erection performance: 80 boxes per minute, with two A3 erectors capable of 40 blanks per minute
Maximum Performance: 400 pouches per minute

Several robots fold cardboard blanks into boxes to prepare them for product packaging.

Smart machine design for ultimate efficiency

A high-performance Flowpacker reliably wraps a total of 13 different types of biscuits in protective film, including rectangular and round biscuits, chocolate-nut varieties and filled bars. With four-axis pick-and-place robots and 3D imaging, Nutrition achieves flexible flowpack packaging for a variety of product formats. The Schubert scanners detect the position, orientation, height and quality of the products – ensuring ideal conditions for maintaining a high-quality standard. Products that do not meet the quality specifications are not detected and therefore not packaged.

The picker line combined with the Flowmodul uses a simple belt instead of a conventional chain with carriers. This means that formats can be changed without the need for time-consuming carrier replacements, making cleaning faster and easier. For longitudinal sealing, Nutrition relies on the gentle ultrasonic process, which also enables the company to use the Flowpacker for paper films – an important factor when it comes to sustainability.

Several robot arms transport cookies with their suction tools onto a conveyor belt.

The second key pillar of the machine concept is the downstream TLM cartoner, which can handle seven different pouch formats and box sizes. Everything from setting up the blanks to filling, sealing and printing the packages is fully automated. Schubert installed two A3 erection units to achieve the targeted erection performance of 80 boxes per minute. The corresponding horizontal magazines for blanks are generously sized to enable cartoning for as long as possible without interruption.

This is achieved in a matter of seconds thanks to the A3 erectors: each of the two units erects 40 blanks per minute and places them onto a vacuum conveyor. A TLM-F4 robot then picks up two boxes at a time and transfers them to another vacuum conveyor, which moves the boxes to the filling position. The two TLM-T4 robots then pick up the flowpacks and place them into the boxes.

Once filled, they continue on to the sealing station with two TLM-F2 robots, each of which seals two boxes simultaneously.

Optimised packaging and tools save material and costs

To meet the customer’s multifaceted requirements, the Schubert team also took a close look at the packaging itself. Smaller box formats with less air between the contents and the carton not only reduce material consumption but also counteract the subjective impression of ‘deceptive packaging’. The packaging experts achieved a better fit for the flowpacks by reducing the cutting lengths and widths, thereby lowering film consumption.

Speaking of pouches: depending on the size of the primary packaging, Nutrition has to change the cells of the grouping chains. Schubert developed a clever design approach specifically for this purpose, which allows the entire grouping chain to be removed. Unlike conventional systems, where two people carry out the tool change, only one person is needed here. The tools are now much more lightweight, and the magazine plates are much smaller and easier to handle.

Industries

Schubert Group