At ProSweets Cologne trade fair, Schubert presented its latest development in TLM technology: the Flowmodul. “Several current orders, combined with many already installed Flowmoduls, prove that we correctly identified and understood our customers’ needs with our flow-wrapping component,” says Ralf Schubert, Managing Director of Gerhard Schubert GmbH. “At the fair, the trade visitors’ interest in this innovation was extremely high.” The flow-wrapping component, which is fully integrated into the TLM picker line, packs many different types of products such as candy bars, biscuits, cakes, 3D chocolate figures, ice cream, puff pastry or confectionary waffles.

The combination of F4 pick-and-place robots, 3D image recognition and one or two flow-wrapping components within a TLM system are what make this system successful. It saves space and, thanks to short changeover times, enables the efficient handling of small batch sizes and a large variety of products. 3D image recognition ensures that the robots only pick up flawless products and place them in the flow-wrapping component’s feed chain. 3D means that not only the rotational position, shape and surface of the products to be packaged are detected, but also their height, which for many products, including sandwich biscuits – as demonstrated at ProSweets – is an important quality criterion.