Noms Bake Shop is in the midst of a growth spurt. The growing demand for its gourmet cookies prompted the Tempe, Ariz.-based upstart to take its operations to the next level by installing a collaborative robot that applies icing consistently and quickly to the sweet treats. The company credits the cobot for boosting throughput and efficiency on its production line while easing the aches and pains of its cookie decorators.
Since it was founded in 2015, Noms has grown 350% year over year selling premium cookies online in the corporate gifting sector. The family-owned company offers about 15 permanent and seasonal cookies, including brown sugar banana, chocolate crinkle (a mashup of a brownie and cookie), and peanut butter and jelly. The cookies are shipped nationwide in high-quality cardboard boxes with magnetic closures or deluxe wood boxes with sliding lids that can be customized with logos, graphics, or personal messages—a premium twist on traditional baked goods that differentiates Noms from other cookie manufacturers in the corporate gifting category, according to co-owner and CEO Trevor Martin.
To prepare the company for expansion, Martin has been automating parts of Noms’ manufacturing facility in Phoenix to eliminate production bottlenecks in making 10,000 cookies a day. In addition to installing new roll-in rack ovens and dough depositors, Noms purchased a cobot from Apex Motion Control called the Baker-Bot for icing its berry shortbread and lemon poppy seed cookies with speed and precision.
Growing pains
Both the berry shortbread and lemon poppy seed cookies are drizzled with icing in a curvy zig-zag pattern in one continuous swirl, a signature element featured in the Noms logo. Prior to using the Baker-Bot, 10 employees squeezed piping bags to ice each cookie by hand. But icing thousands of cookies a day caused pain and discomfort for the workers’ backs, hands, and wrists. As a result of the body strain, the workers could apply icing to only 5,000 cookies a day—half the amount of product the plant produces daily. The next morning employees had to finish icing those remaining 5,000 cookies from the previous day, wait for the icing to dry, and package them before moving on to carry out the production process scheduled for that day. The ergonomic pain got so dire that workers frequently called in sick when they were slated to ice the berry shortbread or lemon poppy seed cookies.
“We typically have 10 people on shift, and each ices 1,000 cookies. When someone calls out, that only amplifies the problem,” Martin says. “If two people don’t show up, now those eight people have even more to do in the same amount of time. So by adding robotics to automate the icing process, we’ve solved the problems with production and staff pain.”
Installed in November 2019 at Noms, the Baker-Bot plays a critical role in increasing production efficiency. After the berry shortbread and lemon poppy seed cookies are baked and cooled, a worker rolls a rack with 20 trays of cookies to the Baker-Bot. He or she fills the hopper with icing and then selects the icing design programmed in the human machine interface, which also includes the specs of the rolling racks and trays. From there, the cobot operates autonomously. Equipped with a 10 kg payload capacity, the robotic arm pulls a tray lined with 24 cookies from the rack and places it underneath the piston filler nozzle, where a camera sensor is located. The cobot uses the camera images to determine where each cookie is located in the tray. The robotic arm moves the tray back and forth and side to side under the piston filler nozzle, which dispenses a precise application of icing to each cookie. Once the entire tray of cookies is decorated with icing, the robotic arm loads the tray back on the rack and pulls the next tray of cookies out of the rack for icing.
Speedy results
