Arnott’s Celebrates 13 Years of Packaging Innovation with Robotics

Arnott Celebrating 13 Years of Technological Advancement in the Packaging Industry

Date: 27th May 2025

History

Since 1865, Arnott’s has been known for its popular range of biscuits. More than 1,045 products are manufactured across 16 sites. Arnott’s sources over 75% of its ingredients locally in New Zealand and Australia. From the 1960s, Arnott’s adopted automation in the packaging and baking, most probably for single variety biscuits. Later, the assembling and segregating part became an automation challenge for Arnott’s. The initiative to introduce advanced technology happens to be a solution for this challenge.

What innovations have driven progress in the food packaging market?

Arnott’s approached a traditional European machinery supplier from Switzerland and Germany. These countries have been providing single variety packing equipment for years. However, the complexity in handling and placing fragile compositions, sizes, and shapes, the automation in packaging couldn’t operate more efficiently. Later, Arnott’s collaborated with an Australian-owned applied robotics company to overcome the challenges. Applied robotics is a new development featuring machine vision, an end-to-end approach, and advanced robotics, conquering the challenges. More than 50 robots and 64 vision systems integrated as a solution. Applied robotics and Arnott’s considered six months of study for confirming to finalize this approach. After successful testing, the new system was introduced for the assorted pack production process.

Impact

The merging of local manufacturing with innovation shifted the packaging market with its transitional change. The automation system has benefited Arnott’s assorted packaging production. The advancement has immensely contributed to the company since 2012. It has improved working conditions and minimized manual labor. The robots have the potential to process 105 biscuits per second, maintaining the same quality process and consistency. It keeps the count of quality control, which will leverage human inspection capability. The flexibility in the production process enables balancing out and meeting the seasonal demand of consumers. It’s an idea-driven concept for biscuit packaging automation. This has reshaped and enhanced the present and future of the food packaging market.

Views and Statements

The solutions general manager of applied robotics, Andrew Hambly, said, traditional European suppliers addressed the problem from the point of view of conventional biscuit machinery. He further added that his company approached the problem differently. They installed robotics and vision systems to create a single system that will improve and replicate the consistency and quality factors similar to human operators.

The founder and technical director of Applied Robotics, Dr Paul Wong, proudly said that the partnership is resembling the Australians’ innovation. A successful effort to solve intricate challenges that international suppliers thought impossible was achieved with this valuable partnership. A solution has kept the production of popular Australian products alive and growing on the home soil.