Assorted product trays

Pacepacker Services has developed a new offline, portable Mixed Tray Loader pick and place system to quickly generate assorted trays of product. For smaller outlets, such as convenience supermarkets and inner city delicatessens, these assorted product trays provide a creative way for retailers to offer a far wider product range on space restricted retail shelves.

The product swap unit, known as the Mixed Tray Loader (MTL), has already been installed at one UK manufacturer of own-label dips. Explaining the logic behind the MTL, Pacepacker business development manager Paul Wilkinson says: “By stocking mixed trays of product, a larger supermarket can hold a wider range of product types, flavours and variants. Equally, a smaller inner city store, which may previously have had to drop lines to make way for other products, can continue to offer a good variety.”

The dip producer clearly sees mixed trays as being an expanding opportunity too. They installed an MTL with a pneumatic Cartesian pick-and-place system positioned over twin lanes of filled trays. The picking heads remove one line of product from the first tray, and places it into the second. The process is then reversed to swap items in both trays. “This customer has already asked us to double the capacity to 20 single layer trays of dips per minute on the initial system, and has said it will order a second high-capacity MTL on delivery of the upgrade,” says Paul. “We could not ask for a clearer indication that there is demand for this type of capability and that our solution is an effective one.”