Pasta, present and future

The biggest branded food producer in Argentina stacks delicate bags of pasta faster and more efficiently with robotic automation.

At Molinos’s Rio de la Plata dried pasta factory outside Buenos Aires, Argentina, the floor is almost spotless. An automated system moves a handful of the 240,000 bags of daily produced pasta swirls and cylinder-shaped mostacciolis from a mixing station to bagging and stacking on pallets without ever touching the ground.

Argentina’s biggest dried pasta maker, with its fast-growing Lucchetti brand, is speeding up production processes and improving product quality with robotic automation. This is helping it keep up with demand and maintain a competitive edge in this pasta-loving country.

And talk about good timing: Molinos first turned to ABB robots in 2008, the same year that ABB Argentina began working with palletising applications. The latest installation at the plant is an IRB 660 floor-mounted palletising robot at the Lucchetti plant.

The latest addition to the Molinos facility, an IRB 660, neatly stacks up to 240 bags of pasta/min. Photo credit: Eduardo Gil

“We have been designing, manufacturing and commissioning cells with nearly 15 robots installed since then,” says ABB Robotics Project Manager Ulises Strangis. “During this time we have customised several kinds of mechanical and vacuum grippers.” With a reach of 3.15 m and 180 kg of payload, the robot turns, twists and lowers its large arm to scoop up bags of pasta and neatly stack them on pallets, alternating between two conveyer belts feeding it up to 240 bags/min. The gripper lays a sheet of kraft paper between each stack. A forklift driver then moves the completed pallets to a machine that secures them with a plastic film before another forklift operator hauls them to an adjacent distribution centre brimming with ready-to-ship pallets.

Molinos has installed six ABB robots at the Lucchetti plant, which has increased productivity by 10%, says production manager Robert Hagen.

“That’s a huge number for us,” he says.

Another upside is “an easier flowing process at the end of the line”, says Hagen.

Flow is vital for feeding the high demand for pasta in Argentina, the world’s ninth largest dried pasta market according to Euromonitor International.

In 2009, when Molinos came out with a catchy advertising campaign for Lucchetti, the company saw its share of the dried pasta market surge to 14.2% by 2011, up from 11.8% in 2008 according to global marketing research firm ACNielsen.

To keep up, Molinos turned to ABB to help design an automated and continuous production line. “A manual solution was out of the question,” says Molinos Process Engineer Javier Holoveski.

Loading each 7.5 to 10 kg set of pasta bags on the pallets is an expensive and strenuous job that had led to recurring injuries on older lines.

Increased automation also helps Molinos compete against smaller manufacturers that have lower cost structures, and to sustain profits even as 25% annual inflation pushes up fuel, ingredients, labour and packaging costs.

“We can compete if we are efficient in making a large production quantity,” Holoveski says.

All of these considerations went into the design of the new palletising robot.

Molinos had previously installed five such robots, with two starting on the Lucchetti spaghetti line and another on the Lucchetti swirls and mostacciolis line in June 2009.

This time, however, the company wanted a system that could do even more. What clinched the deal was the RobotStudio Palletising PowerPac simulation software, which Holoveski confides is as fun for an engineer as a video game.

Molinos and another Argentine company were the world’s first to use this powerful simulation software.

Photo credit: Eduardo Gil

The factory managers played with the 3D program for three months, experimenting with different processes and bouncing ideas off each other and ABB’s team. “Sometimes it can be hard to explain what’s in your mind, but when you see an image you can explain it better, and this leads to more ideas,” Holoveski says. “Each idea can fix a future problem and save time and money.” After exploring five designs, they settled on one with improvements such as programming the gripper’s movements to avoid crushing the pasta when picking up the bags. The software was then downloaded to the robot in a few minutes and operations started, saving the company six to eight months in detecting, confirming and re-engineering glitches of new machinery.

The final design choice also allowed for other ABB products to be implemented.

“After selecting the design, we thought about including automation control systems, low-voltage products and enclosures from the ABB group,” says Ulises Strangis.

Further improvements can be made

Molinos is working with ABB on speeding up the end-of-line process so the pallets run automatically to the plastic wrapping machine, halving forklift duties to one operator.

Another plan is to update the robot palletising application to stack pallets higher so trucks can be filled to the brim, making better use of transport capacity.

Molinos also wants to add a sheet of paper under the first layer of bags to protect them from the rough wood of the pallet.

“The good thing is that we’re never talking about hardware, only software,” Holoveski says. “This makes it a lot easier to make changes.”

Further automation that will speed up end of-the-line processes even more is planned for the Molinos facility.

Robot benefits

• Increase in productivity: 10%
• Lower labour costs
• Easy-to-design automation process with RobotStudio Palletising PowerPac simulation software
• Changes made without fiddling with hardware

Molinos Rio de la Plata

Founded in 1902 by Ernesto Bunge and Jorge Born, Molinos Rio de la Plata has grown from a wheat miller to the biggest branded food products maker in Argentina. It operates 20 manufacturing plants and 10 distribution centres and employs 5000 people. Initially specialising in wheat processing, Molinos has expanded into animal feed, pasta, rice, chicken nuggets, coffee, frozen hamburgers, margarine, sausages and vegetable oils. Today it meets 11% of food demand in Argentina and exports to more than 50 countries. Expansion picked up pace after Argentina’s Perez Companc family bought control of the company in 1999. Under the family’s control, Molinos has expanded into the commodities business, biodiesel and wine, helping to diversify revenue streams.

The latest ventures include the purchase of a stake in an Italian gourmet food maker and the takeover of a Chilean food company