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Apple packing plant automates palletizing

Washington Fruit & Produce significantly reduces labor and product damage when it implements robotic palletizing systems at its two apple-packing plants.

Washington Fruit’s North plant has five robotic palletizing cells, each with four lanes.
Washington Fruit’s North plant has five robotic palletizing cells, each with four lanes.

Washington Fruit & Produce Company of Yakima, WA, is a family-owed company that has been packing apples and cherries since 1916. The company operates two facilities, River Road South and River Road North, in operation since 2010 and 2015, respectively. According to Washington Fruit System Operator Mikey Hanks, Washington Fruit’s newest plant is “the fastest apple packing facility on earth,” processing an average of 4,000 apples per minute.

In engineering the North facility’s case-palletizing operations, Washington Fruit duplicated a robotic system in use at its South facility supplied by Columbia/Okura LLC. At its previous packing plant—in operation from 1993 to 2010—case palletizing was a manual job requiring up to 12 workers.

For the North facility’s case-palletizing operations, Washington Fruit duplicated technology in use at the South plant, using upgraded software to program a multitude of case sizes and pallet patterns. The company originally began using Columbia/Okura’s systems when it designed its South facility. At its previous packing plant—in operation from 1993 to 2015—case palletizing was a manual job requiring up to 12 workers.

“We didn’t consider automation at the time,” says Hanks. “That’s just how the facility was set up, and it worked. This was back before robotics were really taking off, so it really wasn’t a big deal.”

But with the South facility, Washington Fruit wanted palletizing equipment that could reduce labor as well as the ergonomic complaints resulting from manual stacking. Going into the process, Hanks admits the company didn’t know where to begin. “We didn’t even know what requirements we were supposed to have,” he says.

Introduced to Columbia/Okura through a third party, Washington Fruit presented the equipment supplier with information such as how many items they packed at a time, the number of lanes they wanted, the number of SKUs they wanted stacked at the same time, and the estimated packing speed. With this data, Columbia/Okura specified five robotic palletizing cells each equipped with an A1600 four-axis, multi-articulated robot arm and four lanes. “It just fell into place,” says Hanks.

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