Cama Group, parent company of Cama North America, recently hosted an open house to celebrate its move to new, larger headquarters in Molteno, Italy. Customers were treated to a tour of the new facility and a look at Cama’s robotic packaging line for naked chocolates.
The new facility features a production space of 82,000 sq. ft. (25,000 m2) and 16,000 sq. ft. (5,000 m2) of office space. Cama Group is a global supplier of secondary packaging systems, with subsidiaries in Italy, France, United Kingdom, Asia, Northern Europe, Australia, and Cama North America in Buffalo Grove, IL. Visitors from several countries took advantage of the open house invitation, including France, Poland, Netherlands, and Turkey.
The turnkey robotic packaging line was designed for Hawaiian Host, a North American confectionary company. The system is designed to robotically load various shapes of naked chocolates into trays at speeds up to 1500 ppm. It features 15 packaging counts, 17 packaging formats, five SKU styles.
Using in-house designed robots, the system loads a plastic tray into each carton, then picks and places the chocolates into trays. Subsequent stations place a padded liner over the chocolates and then a lid atop the carton.
Cama specialists were on hand to highlight benefits such as full Industry 4.0 architecture; extremely quick RFID-managed part changeovers; comprehensive augmented reality (AR) capabilities, for training, operation, maintenance and spares; and a line-supervision and data-collection system for machine learning and analytics. While this robotic packaging line features state-of-the-art technology and full automation, it is still very simple to use.
Customers were surprised to see that we are able to design machines/lines with a vision system embedded to treat naked products. This relatively new technology has been very successful and allows the system to handle multiple shapes. They also were able to view the high quality of Cama machines in terms of sanitary design, ease of use, and format change repetitiveness.
