Sick AG

Arla produces numerous milk products, including yogurt. The finished end product is packaged in a pot of several deciliters, six of which are placed in each box. The boxes of yogurt are loaded onto a pallet for transport.

The use of plastic in the packaging of yogurt and other products needs to be reduced. That’s why Arla’s factory also switched from plastic boxes to cardboard boxes. The challenge: The adhesive of a cardboard box would sometimes fail on the production line. Occasionally it would happen that one of the six yogurt pots in the box was missing. A ruptured cardboard box will no longer hold the yogurt pots in their place, and an incompletely filled box can no longer support other yogurt boxes. Whole pallets of yogurt can then fall down because a box is damaged or filled incorrectly.

Every box is measured and analyzed!

“On the packaging line, the production system has a small blind spot so the operator of the machine cannot see the boxes properly,” says Janne Nickström, the production coordinator at Arla.

A single defective box can already become a problem. It was clear that every packaged box would need to be measured, analyzed, and then accepted or rejected.

Arla turned to PJ Control, a supplier of automation solutions, to jointly search for a suitable technical solution. It turns out that the shape of a correctly loaded, intact yogurt box is consistent and clear, so it was not only possible but also surprisingly easy to measure and analyze its three-dimensional shape. The perfect choice for this task: the TriSpector1000 3D vision sensor.

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