Walkers Crisps Production Line, United Kingdom

Walkers Crisps is a UK brand with a 47% share of the British crisp market. The company is owned by PepsiCo Inc, (which also owns the US crisp producer Frito-Lay) and has sales of $85bn per year.

The Walkers site in Leicester, England, is arguably one of the largest crisp production plants in the world, producing over 11 million bags of crisps per day and using about 800t of potatoes (280,000t per year).

The site's Leycroft Road plant produces classic flat Walkers crisps while the Bursom plant, also on the Leicester site, produces Sensations, Nobby's Crisps, Max deep ridge crisps, Chipsticks and Frazzles.

SCHUBERT EQUIPMENT

In order to boost production, Walkers ordered four TLM-F44 automated packaging systems from Schubert UK for installation in the fourth quarter of 2007. The systems were developed by IPS, Schubert's specialist packaging integration subsidiary.

SYSTEM

The four packaging systems handle the packing of multi-bags of crisps by placing the three varieties of packet into horizontal flow wrappers (fill and seal). The TLM-F44 system is equipped with the carbon fibre TLM-F4 robot arm, which weighs 25% less than the previous aluminium version, allowing faster cycle times.

OPERATION

Storage hoppers above two vibratory bowl feeders supply the lines with 480 bags per minute. The system then uses optical detection to guide pick-and-place robots equipped with vacuum suckers to position the six or 12 packs into in-feed chain carriers. The packets are then sent to form, fill and seal flow wrappers.

The Schubert system uses its patented counter-flow technology where two chains operate against the flow of the product conveyor, making sure that there are only fully-loaded chain divisions.

Unidentified or incorrectly positioned crisp packets are sent back to the storage hoppers.

The systems were designed to handle a wide range of pack sizes (six, 12, 14 and 26) and are able to quickly change over to different product formats.