Joshua Miers-Jones – Punchbowl Automation:
“Any farm or packhouse operation will tell you that labour availability is a problem”
Berry packhouses have automated optical grading and high-speed packing in recent years, but the job of loading punnets into trays at the end of the line has remained largely manual.
Punchbowl Automation is targeting that final step with its new SpeedStacker robotic case packer, with demand growing as growers look to increase packhouse efficiency. Punchbowl’s Joshua Miers-Jones says the problem the SpeedStacker solves emerged as packhouses became faster upstream.
“Companies have created solutions for optical grading and for high-speed packing, and that’s automated that side of the packhouse, but it’s pushed the manual components of the packhouse downstream,” Miers-Jones says. “So now the packhouse is automated for grading and packing, but you’ve still got a lot of manual operations, manual labour, downstream.”
The company began from a New Zealand kiwifruit packhouse called Punchbowl, where its automation arm was developed to solve the packhouse’s own operational challenges. The SpeedStacker itself began after a berry grower approached the company looking to automate the manual packing table.
“A blueberry grower actually came to us wanting to automate his manual tray packing, which was 4 to 5 people manually packing punnets of fruit into trays, with something robotic,” he says. “This is the one part of the packhouse that isn’t automated at high speeds for a berry grower.”
The company has since sold three machines in New Zealand, including to the country’s largest blueberry packer, and six into Australia.
“That was about as fast as we could run for the past six months, so we’ve been increasing our engineering team and manufacturing capacity to scale up for the demand,” Miers-Jones says.
Speed was one of the major engineering challenges, with some berry lines running at up to 200 punnets a minute. The machine also needs to cope with the variety of formats used across blueberry, raspberry and strawberry operations.
“They’ll pack various SKUs, different punnet sizes, different punnet shapes, different tray sizes, different formations in the tray, and that varies from customer to customer and market to market,” he says.
The SpeedStacker therefore needs to change between formats quickly while remaining simple enough to operate without a highly skilled worker. Punchbowl is also developing a wider automated system around the case packer, including an auto-feed system that supplies empty trays to the machine and further downstream equipment.
“At the end of the day it’s not just about reducing labour costs, it’s also about reducing reliance on labour, reducing operational complexity, and reducing downtime.”
The company targets a return on investment of less than three years, with larger customers getting closer to two years. Miers-Jones says labour availability is becoming an increasingly important part of the calculation.
“If you look at any farm or packhouse operation in almost any market, they’ll tell you at the moment that labour availability is a problem,” he says. “It’s hard to get the people, and the cost pressures are going up.”
Reliability is particularly important for seasonal packhouses, where equipment has to perform during a relatively short window.
“We pride ourselves on exceptional service; we’ve got an incredible service team that looks after our customers, but we also offer comprehensive spare parts packages, so that if anything did go down, you can get the machine back up and running with minimal downtime.
The company is now expanding its presence in the global berry industry, with grower days planned in Australia throughout September and early sales activity beginning in the U.S. market. Punchbowl will also exhibit at the Blueberry Convention in Monterey, California, from September 22-24.
For seasonal operations, Miers-Jones says automation can provide another way to increase capacity without continually expanding the physical size of the packhouse.
“By automating the process all the way through, and we’ve got a very heavily automated kiwifruit packhouse here in New Zealand, it allows you to pack for more hours in the day, so you can put on two shifts or three shifts instead of increasing the size of your operation,” he says.
For more information:
Joshua Miers-Jones
Punchbowl Automation
https://punchbowlautomation.co.nz/
joshua@punchbowl.co.nz
Tel: +64 21 193 3771
