Small Potato Producer Gets a Grip on Growth via Robotics

As the company increased the speed of the processing lines, manually packing the bags of potatoes in boxes became an issue. The packing space did not allow for additional line staff. Additionally, the company wanted to minimize the human touch points to ensure the best food safety and quality practices.

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“We want to make sure our potatoes are the safest they can be from farm to fork,” says Lindsey Mebane, food safety manager for Tasteful Selections. “Before we had the robotics, everything was done by hand. For food safety, that is a little bit of a concern because there are more hands touching the product. Granted, they are wearing gloves, but there’s still human contact.”

Robots handling the potatoes, however, was cause for concern as well, since they could potentially cause more bumps and bruises than human handling. Having not only a food-safe but also gentle robotic solution was of utmost importance.

Tasteful Selections approached Soft Robotics—which makes advanced technologies that enable automation of a wide variety of products—to find a robotic gripper that could reliably grab a shifting bag of potatoes while easing the positioning tolerance requirements of the robot and the machine vision imaging system guiding it. The solution was Soft Robotics’ mGrip soft gripper.

“The end-of-arm tooling for this application needed to be able to handle a lot of variability,” explains Ben Gibson, applications engineering manager of packaging solutions for Soft Robotics. “These are mesh bags of baby potatoes. Depending on how the product settles on the belt, it can end up in lots of different shapes or sizes. We were able to handle all of this with a single end-of-arm tool.”

Plus, the unique gripper material allows the bags to be grabbed without any concern of damaging the product by applying too much force or using a rigid gripping tool. “We chose Soft Robotics because of the softness of the plastic and its integration with the Fanuc robot,” says Emilio Lemus, automation manager for Tasteful Selections. “It speeds up the process a lot, and at the same time, takes care of our product the way we want it.”

The pneumatic actuated tool allows the operators to control the air pressure to either tighten or loosen the grip on the bags of potatoes. It also knows exactly the correct number of bags to fill a box as well as where to place them in the box. 

“It helps with the quality—hands aren’t being harsh on them—and it helps with the overall efficiency because we are sending what we are supposed to be sending out, so it eliminates a lot of human error,” Mebane says. 

Innovation gets results

As a result of the mGrip-enabled robotic work cell, Tasteful Selections was able to exceed 45 bags per minute and increase its packing line’s overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by 15%, achieving 100% return on investment (ROI) within nine months.

Adding robotics also enabled the company to achieve another advantage in 2020—a way to easily social distance employees on the production line. “Because of the robotics, we had less people on the line, so that really helped with the social distancing,” Mebane says. “It allows the people to be farther apart because the person putting the bags in boxes isn’t standing right next to the person putting boxes on the pallet.”

With the investment in automation, Tasteful Selections has been able to grow very quickly as well as maintain the quality of its small potatoes for customers. And it’s all been done at an attractive price point.

“If we don’t innovate, we’re not going to be competitive. Our prices will go up,” McHenry says. “We haven’t taken a price increase in 10 years on our product. We’re able to maintain that through automation.”